@FediTips With all due respect...

Your main argument seems to be a fear that if offered a lot of money, that someone running a huge instance like mastodon.social will eagerly sell it if a large enough offer comes up.

My question to you is, what constitutes a "large instance"? Is there an exact number and if so, do you believe that all instances should be capped at that number and no longer allowed to accept new users?

Thanks.

@Mrfunkedude @FediTips

It is a poor experience right now for lots of reasons, not just this hypothetical (although there is no shortage of corporations betraying trust, so not necessarily *that* hypothetical.)

It is hard to get to know your neighbours on a large instance. SOOO many messages. MUCH harder to moderate, which means abusers slip through. Costs more money to run. Waters down core theme (retro, music, academia, etc.) if applicable. Why voluntarily submit to a poorer experience?

@Mrfunkedude @Her_Doing @FediTips No. It doesn't. It's somewhat subjective - but also varies wildly based on the culture associated with the instance particularly.

But it's also a well understood general trend that moderator-to-user ratios are very important to managing an instance.

The idea is to structurally prevent scalability issues not muck around with arbitrary questions of "at what precise amount do grains of sand become a pile"? Because that's completely subjective and completely unreasonable of a lens to take.

@Mrfunkedude @Her_Doing @FediTips From an instance provider's perspective, it's a much more reasonable question because they can relate back to pragmatic primitives like cost and their own experiences of maintainability.

But from an outside perspective? It's completely amorphous.

It's more productive to talk about structurally preventing these issues than it is to mull over what precise size is "too big" in a generalized sense.

@scien @Her_Doing @FediTips I agree that having a good amount of moderators to match the scale of the instance is important for issues that can't be resolved by blocking.

My only issue is that if we're going to talk about "scalability issues" then isn't it important to define what that means since any size instance can have those issues?

Also keep in mind that my original response was regarding the idea that large instances were inherently bad. Hence why I asked what "too big" meant.