I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about performance improvements for Mastodon.

What matters first, for user experience and retention, is the speed of federation. New messages must flow from shard to shard as desired. The spice is new messages.

So I guess the trick is gonna be to figure out how to make pubsubwhatever webhooks fire in reasonable time.

Challenges: learn the spec, read the current implementation, work within the current operational constraints to solve the problem.
I have just figured out what was making me fractious about my workplace: not enough doing this, too many meetings.