I can’t speak to how traffic costs and mastodon works, but this article explains how having multiple blue skies federating with each other scales quadratically. https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/ it is very thorough.
In fact, it is worse than the storage requirements, because the message delivery requirements become quadratic at the scale of full decentralization: to send a message to one user is to send a message to all. Rather than writing one letter, a copy of that letter must be made and delivered to every person on earth
That’s written assuming the edge case of EVERYBODY running a full relay and appview, and that’s not per-node scaling cost but global scaling cost.
Because they don’t scale like that, global cost is geometric instead (for every full relay and appview, there’s one full copy with linear scaling to network activity), and each server only handles the cost for serving their own users’ activity (plus firehose/jetstream subscription & filtering for those who need it)
For Mastodon instance costs, try ask the former maintainers of https://botsin.space/
I can’t speak to how traffic costs and mastodon works, but this article explains how having multiple blue skies federating with each other scales quadratically. https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/ it is very thorough.
That’s written assuming the edge case of EVERYBODY running a full relay and appview, and that’s not per-node scaling cost but global scaling cost.
Because they don’t scale like that, global cost is geometric instead (for every full relay and appview, there’s one full copy with linear scaling to network activity), and each server only handles the cost for serving their own users’ activity (plus firehose/jetstream subscription & filtering for those who need it)
For Mastodon instance costs, try ask the former maintainers of https://botsin.space/