That's what they're saying.
Essentially - if someone from the small instance subscribes to a community that has a ton of data (huge post volume, images, whatever), the small instance needs to pull data over from the larger instance. At some point there may be communities that are so large small instances can't pull them in without tanking.
My big complaint about the game was that it's so multiplayer focused while making it so very hard to coordinate a play-session with friends.
One friend running late? Well, you'll either need to get a ship that's too big for the group until the friend joins (and hope they actually do), or you'll have to end and restart the session to size up the ship.
Someone needs to go suddenly? Same problem but possibly worse (since you've probably got a ship full of stuff and could run into other players as you go to turn in, which could suddenly make sign-off a drag)
Hey, we'll always have narwals baconing at midnight
No idea - but I actually think the Fediverse concept maps to Reddit way better than it has other social networks so I could see some iteration of this really catching on over time.
For something like Twitter, the whole value proposition is "one big universal conversation" and the federated stuff gets in the way of that a little bit, but Reddit has always been a federation of communities (who occasionally fight, join together, cross post, etc) - that maps really well to this stuff.
I wonder how that’ll play out in this federated model. Many of these problems sound like general problems with being a mod (honestly it sounds horrible) rather than uniquely Reddit.
The federated approach will shrink communities for a time but I worry that there’ll be a sharp recentralization as instances stop federating with anything below some size to avoid a wave of spam/junk (similar to the problems small mail servers see).
But I’m new to this model so maybe there’s a reason it won’t play out that way