So, the interesting thing about federation here is that people are expected to drink from the firehose.

I don't know anybody who reads the twitter global timeline, although you could, and when I first signed up for twitter in 2006 most people did. If the federiverse takes off then we should expect sidebar links to local & federated timelines to become less prominent or maybe go away entirely.

@enkiv2 I too was considering how hectic a Federated timeline would be in mass adoption.

However, by that time I feel we will have ways to filter what we want through control options such as keywords, or even specifying "only one toot per second" and so you can read it without having a seizure.

@tfj I was thinking in terms of the pressure it might put on nodes, rather than the pressure it might put on user eyeballs. I mean, automatic updates of the feed will probably be disabled early, but no node necessarily has to drink the whole firehose ever, if it can instead pull specific date ranges & user lists from peers.
@enkiv2 @tfj Keep in mind the federated timeline does not contain every toot on every remote peer. It only contains toots for remote users that have at least one follower on the local server. So it's at least "somewhat" curated in an indirect way.
@Thracky @tfj That's good to know -- although if there are few big servers densely interconnected the difference is marginal.
@enkiv2 I've been going out of my way to follow as many federated people as possible to turn federated timeline into a firehose :P