The downside of that is if you break something, it affects a lot more people.

Now you've got me thinking about redundancy both in the web server and the database server. Not that I would ever have reason to go that far with my (for practical purposes) single user hub.

Although it would be more efficient to have a very large server with millions of people, for legal, technical, and philosophical reasons, we want to pursue decentralization.

I certainly wasn't suggesting massive centralization, merely wondering about the trade-offs since you will be in the position to actually have choices that most of us will never need to consider.

I wish you luck and look forward to hearing more about how this project goes.

If Alice and Bob are on different servers, obviously any messages between them would be on both servers, but if they are on the same server, do they share the messages in the database or do they each have their own copy? If the messages are shared, it seems like this could make fewer, larger servers more space-efficient than more, smaller servers.

Another scalability question comes to mind... Can you have multiple web servers for the same Hubzilla database (not a single database server with multiple Hubzilla databases)?

Tiny phone screens are NOT designed for long-form posts.

I would modify that to say that they are not designed to WRITE long-form posts. A consumer of content might prefer to use their small screen while a creator of content might prefer a large screen. Everyone is going to do some of each, but there may be a large % whose "content" primarily consists of likes and very short replies.

Here is an analogy that comes to mind. Take a more traditional web site with comments. The tools used by the the content creators of the site will be vastly different from viewers and commenters on the site. This is a more extreme case of what I'm trying to point out.

If you tried to make a Hubzilla app that rummaged around in your contacts, you might have an insurrection on your hands among the old guard since privacy is considered a key feature.

I hope they aren't coming here expecting that we have official fact-checkers.