#verticalfederation — Public Fediverse posts

Another aspect of this (which comes up often to me) is, what kind of scaling strategy would fit better considering the #Mastodon system *and* protocol architecture?

Would from a network perspective (and overall) be less expensive (computationally) to apply #VerticalFederation to servers?

Or would it be better/would ease the load if we decentralize into smaller instances through #HorizontalFederation and pay the network #federation overhead price?

@Gargron any thoughts on this?

From an #onboarding friction perspective—and as you've seen with all the new #TwitterMigration users coming from mainstream social media and scrambling to grasp the server concept, lost and looking for the usual 'damned' #Mastodon sign-up form—the #VerticalFederation seems to work well:

A mastodon.social could act as a prime server where those people first land, an intermediate step per se, before considering venturing further into the #fediverse and #decentralization.

To tackle this I see three generic scaling strategies emerging from the discussion:

#VerticalFederation akin to @Gargron/mastodon.social, scaling 'up' the most popular servers to keep up with demand.

#HorizontalFederation advocating a more fragmented/decentralized ecosystem with servers breaking up into smaller instances, and solutions like account count limits.

#FlatFederation advocating mostly for a greater #SingleTenant approach, where everyone should set up their own mastodon server.

@katzenberger @Gargron I can see Mastodon having a bunch of core (generalist) servers to support it - the ones new users turn to when joining, because that's the norm on non-federated social platforms.

Limiting account count is sensible, IMHO.

But given the above, I wonder what should be the best approach: a couple big servers extraordinarily scaled (#VerticalFederation)? Or a dozen medium sized "core generalist" servers (adding more if needed) (#HorizontalFederation)?

cc @aral