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Comment by anderspitman | Hacker News Reader

If a federated protocol causes the average user to use more than 1TB of traffic in a month, then it's a bad protocol.

There very well may be exceptional cases (famous people regularly going viral), but they wouldn't want to be hosting from a home location anyway.

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Yes, I'm sure someone like Selena Gomez is going to get her team to self hosting from her EC2 instance /s

The "famous people" care about getting their posts to fans. If you're able to convince and migrate hundreds of millions of teenagers to this self-hosted dream, sure. However, that's just not going to happen.

In this dream, I imagine people like Selena Gomez would pay for a Mastodon account to be hosted by a 3rd party. She would gladly pay thousands of dollars a year for her Twitter account if that was the only way for her to keep it, and not even notice the cost. There will be plenty of Mastodon providers willing to offer five 9s for far less than that.

> five 9s

Lololol. Good lord. Tell me you don't work in product without saying you don't work in product.

She gives zero fucks about Five 9's. Maybe her tech team gives like 1/8 of a fuck, but no more beyond that. She only cares about the number of people she reaches with one tweet/toot/whatever, and simply being faster/self-hosted/data owned/reliable/federated has nothing to do with that.

Does being this abrasive generally result in conversations you feel are productive?

> Maybe her tech team gives like 1/8 of a fuck

r/suspiciouslyspecific

Virality is a big part of social media. The fact that a lot of people wanting to see something I made punishes me with hundreds of dollars worth of overage fees means that it's just bad to use it. You are punished for "succeeding".

It's not about the average user, but when said average user gets their 15 minutes.

As I said, if the protocol itself can't handle this scenario, it's doomed to have low adoption. Unless of course ISPs get pressured into lifting datacaps. Maybe a "viral" clause for exactly these sorts of situations? I think there are multiple potential solutions.

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