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 This thread really opened my eyes and as an instance owner I'm going to put some thought into how to tackle this problem.
I appreciate you taking the time to point this out to better improve the Fediverse.