Starting your own instance doesn’t solve the problem of big communities being reliant on the one specific instance they are hosted on to not go down or rogue.

I imagine it like friend requests between communities: x@instance.a, all-about-x@instance.b and x-is-great@instance.c could send each other friend requests and merge into one federated meta-community about x. Then if one instance goes down the other two are still there to keep the meta-community alive, and if one goes rogue the others can just unfriend and keep going without it.

The nice thing about manual federation is that the communities don’t have to have exactly the same name, and the mods can keep malicious or troll communities out. And ofc you could still have client-side control if you want to, e.g. add or remove a community just for you locally, or create your own local meta-community.

The database, storage and network are usually the bottlenecks in these kinds of websites, not the programming language. It might add a few ms of latency, but the big lags come from congestion or bad db queries.

What comment?

Just leaving this here: Aurora Store