@blakereid @mmasnick No, needs to be low enough stress for the people operating the system so they don't quit, and needs to attract or create people with the necessary technical competence to keep it running.

A communication platform like Mastodon can survive with 30 people or 300 million people, as long as one out of every 30 or so people is able to fix problems as they arise, and as long as no group of people can make the platform useless to everybody else.

Whether regular people can use it or not obviously affects the regular people, but its effect on the survivability of the platform itself is very small and possibly negative. Consider how many Commodore 64 users there are today versus how many Macintosh 512K users. Or how many IRC users (about a hundred thousand) versus how many AIM users (zero). Or how many FidoNet users (about a hundred thousand I think) versus how many Minitel users (zero).

I think you didn't think your ideas through before tooting to see if they made sense.