What most people in this thread don’t realize is that what you’re seeing right here is the problem with federated services in this day and age.
Federation protocols and systems just are not mature enough to scale.
Yes you will essentially always have to abandon ship anytime any federated service scales up it’s user base. It will always be entirely unaffordable and unobtainable for randoms to host their own servers because the compute storage and networking requirements will far exceed what most can’t afford.
As an aggregate federated services are always more expensive to host then centralized services. And that cost scales less efficiently than centralized services. Meaning that with linear user growth you get exponential cost growth, and the barrier for entry follows.
Which means that all federated services have to have centralization in order to scale. In their current form.
This is a really tough problem to solve and is going to take a lot of time and money to build good solutions for. Time and money that… You guessed it, is largely funded by profits not donations.
And now we have looped back around.
The Internet is just a bunch of servers my dude.
Someone has to pay for them, and all the other infrastructure around them. And with a large part of the world being on the internet a significant portion of their day the costs for even the most efficient centralized services running “at scale” (see: hundreds of millions MAU) are astronomical. In the tens of millions to hundreds of millions of $ annually, just an infrastructure, never mind human resources.
Almost none of these companies survive off of donations. Wikipedia stands out as one that does mainly because they host static content, which is incredibly cost efficient to serve up., and even then their costs are pretty astronomical (there are some debates around their costs of course).
Federated services have an asymmetric scaling problem. A linear growth in users results in a exponential growth in infrastructure costs. While centralized services tend to be almost the entire opposite of that and usually see logarithmic infrastructure costs against linear user growth. Where infrastructure costs are more efficient as their user base grows.
Federated services don’t benefit from running at scale, the more they scale up the less benefit there is to scaling. It’s a really shit situation to be in.
This is why the internet is largely just cyber feudalism. Because the only ones that can afford to host large scaled services for their users are the ones that are making money off of it. And that’s for centralized services, never mind decentralized services which are unbelievably more expensive to host.
I’m coming at this from the standpoint of an engineer, I don’t have answers or solutions, but the first thing we have to do in order to start figuring out solutions is to recognize the problem.