What happens if Mastodon scales up 100x? Would it continue to operate smoothly?
But the nice thing is that no single instance has to scale 100x to scale the network by 100x.
100 instances can scale 2x or 1000 instances can scale 1.2x or 10000 instances can scale 1.02x... You get the point.
Mastodon is designed to have people sign up into communities and then spread out into the fediverse from there.
However, Mastodon is federated, so there are thousands of instances with less users. And because each instance does not need to store the state of the whole network (only accounts followed by its users), it scales very nicely.
Reddit will go the way of Facebook within 5 years I suspect and self hosted federated subreddits are the logical increment. I bet someone is working on it already.
I plan to use ActivityPub so it can integrate with mastodon and peertube more easily but also have an option to pull over from reddit so people can use their own instance as a frontend to reddit. Makes migration easier IMO.
https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma
I follow a bunch of people on pleroma based instances from my mastodon account without problem.