Estimating the bandwidth usage of social protocols

Context: see BS thread, starting here.

My take: today's social protocol competition will evolve until the two spaces complement each other:

• ATProto's shared-heap model structurally favours few servers, "and thus has a natural centralizing force", as CWL argued recently
• ActivityPub has an incentive to keep the average followers/user low.

So broadcast-style social media seems better suited to the ATmosphere, which will probably remain dominated by a few servers, while the Fediverse is for our cozyweb spaces.

Of course, the former still needs a business model to pay for those big, expensive servers, while the latter doesn't have one and will remain probably charmingly* amateurish and shoestringy. There are room and roles for both.

(*) not always