I actually generally hear this phrase IRL from teenagers making minimum wage while trying to get some boomer to stop badgering them to accept an expired coupon.

It will be interesting to see how a distributed system solves this problem.

The issue really comes down to the infrastructure costs. The fediverse is by design significantly less efficient with hardware than a centralized system. It isn’t that it’s difficult to scale, it’s just that it’s expensive to scale. And since the hardware is maintained by generosity of donation…

This is offset by the higher interest in volunteer labour, though.

I think the “solution” is just to accept that instances will burst in and out of existence (and favour) based on time and generosity.