I already don't trust mastodon links because 9 times out of 10 they simply don't work. Everyone's tiny hobby server falls over when one post gets big, and obviously not everyone is going to scale their servers to support the load of a viral post that might happen once every 6 months and will be 100x their base load
As a community effort where no one is expecting to get rich it might work.
It's an annoyance, often anecdotal at most. Not the foundation of why a platform cannot ever "work".
If someone sent any link or post that is from that Mastodon instance and it went viral, the entire instance will be sent to the ground and out for hours, making the post unavailable to be viewed.
The worst part is journalists and the media have to be told that posting a link from a 'small niche community' on Mastodon will send a flood of traffic that will knock it down offline also giving the impression to others that it is not ready for mainstream at all or even ready to onboard on tens or hundreds of millions of users, daily like Twitter.
Unfortunately there's no way to construct a link that references the post but opens where it belongs for you. I think there needs to be a fediverse URL protocol to solve for this, ie this HN post would link to `fedi://@jonty@chaos.social/110307532009155432`, then when people clicked it they wouldn't have to talk to chaos.social, because it would be opened at their home server.
Another option could be a 'copy link for public access' that generates a static page for the purpose of sharing widely.
Journalists and media could also run their own server which is scaled for the traffic they expect, and mirror the post there. The main problem is linking to the source of the post instead of linking to a federated representation of it.
> Most people don't even have a fediverse account ffs.
This is why you won't see a Bluesky post linked on HN, no one can open it. Imagine if you could sign up on your choice of thousands of servers and get the same access to the content rather than a central site, that's fediverse, it's not that complex.