Ok continuing up the fediverse learning curve… what’s the best read on the debate around scalability questions for ActivityPub and federated systems?

@elipariser Do you know @evan? May be worth connecting if not. Evan had a hand (and brain) in this.

@vanderwal @elipariser I'm interested in scalability. Most of the analyses I've read start with uninformed assumptions about the fediverse as a strawman and then draw unfounded conclusions from those bad bases.

@vanderwal @elipariser also, we have a really dumb problem in the tech world, where we conflate scalable business models (jackpot models where small input gives great output at low probability) with scalable system architectures (can add resources to keep up with demand). It's really a ridiculous mistake, but it's also two concepts that lie very close to each other.

@evan @vanderwal Yeah. Definitely thinking about the latter. The question I was thinking about is... if the cost to host a server goes up dramatically/exponentially as the network scales, what does that mean for decentralization?

@elipariser @vanderwal so, that's just not true.

The cost of hosting a server goes up significantly when you've got superusers on your server -- accounts with many hundreds of thousands or millions of followers.

This is true for many kinds of social networks. I know that at Twitter, it was a major problem in the early days of the company. And that was for distribution within their own environment.