That did not really answer the question. Twitter allows me to disseminate a photo or video to the entire world, at no risk to myself, for free. How does mastodon address the use case?
And to answer the question about bandwidth: If Obama with 150K followers spread across 1500 servers posts a 200KB image:
Obama's server will:
- have an outbound bandwidth of 300MB
- storage increased by 200KB.
The 1500 subscribing servers will:
- each have inbound bandwidth of 200KB
- have outbound bandwidth to devices of 20MB if they have 100 users each
- increase storage by 200KB
Those subscribers can boost(retweet) the toot, and then their subscribers will see it too. If they are on the same servers, the increase in bandwidth is only getting it to their devices.
- increase in storage of 200KB
Anybody following your account will receive that toot and photo unless the server they are on has blocked your server or your account. I don't believe there are any limitations to how far your toots can fly other than that.
That is due to too many users jumping on when the servers were not sized for the amount of activity. My server is doing just fine, but I have a relatively small number of users and activity.
