Actually quite the opposite, if there are more instances, and they are fairly well balanced the load is shared between them - yes there is some inefficiency, but each server still has less load than if you tried to put all the content and users on one server.
As for how many are willing… There are now over 10,000 Mastodon instances, and many of them are on servers which now have spare capacity (there was a spike in load after Musk first started doing silly things at Twitter, this has reduced a bit since). I think quite a few Mastodon admin are considering spinning up Lemmy and/or kbin too. Mastodon/Lemmy/kbin all integrate with each other and the wider fediverse.
Actually quite the opposite, if there are more instances, and they are fairly well balanced the load is shared between them - yes there is some inefficiency, but each server still has less load than if you tried to put all the content and users on one server.
As for how many are willing… There are now over 10,000 Mastodon instances, and many of them are on servers which now have spare capacity (there was a spike in load after Musk first started doing silly things at Twitter, this has reduced a bit since). I think quite a few Mastodon admin are considering spinning up Lemmy and/or kbin too. Mastodon/Lemmy/kbin all integrate with each other and the wider fediverse.
People think that decentralised networks can’t scale because they don’t understand that that is exactly how the internet works.
Imagine if these people knew how email works, that never took off /s
Or usenet. Or IRC. Or torrents… Etc. Everything old is new again. Hell the internet was originally designed to route around central points of failure.