People were getting priced out of hosting an instance with "only" 10-20k users and the instance hosting services quote <= 4k users with the 4k end being >$US100/month. With the "low end" 1-200 user instances having 4 cores, 5tb of monthly bandwidth, etc.
The general sense I have got is that mastodon - the default software at least - is extremely resource heavy for relatively low user counts. My assumption/hope was that the bulk of this is that the server software hasn't ever really been under sufficient pressure to improve, and takahē seems to indicate that there's at least some room for improvement on the server side (i.e. performance problems aren't entirely protocol/architecture problems)
The general sense I have got is that mastodon - the default software at least - is extremely resource heavy for relatively low user counts. My assumption/hope was that the bulk of this is that the server software hasn't ever really been under sufficient pressure to improve, and takahē seems to indicate that there's at least some room for improvement on the server side (i.e. performance problems aren't entirely protocol/architecture problems)