We should not be optimising Mastodon so it can handle more people per server. We should be optimising Mastodon so it incentivises more serves with fewer people.
(And if you take that line of thinking to its logical conclusion, you arrive at the idea behind the Small Web: https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/)
@aral the more (small) servers people start: the population on Mastodon will get more 'diverse'. Wouldn't that cause a bigger load on each server as it needs to maintain more federated connections? Or does it work in a complete different way? (just getting curious