I am not convinced of the reasoning, and, in my opinion it's actually working against the idea of "federation", and even against the whole paradigm the internet is built upon: as a UserAgent you should retrieve content when the user requests it.
I created an ActivityPub service which (coincidentally) uses a similar storage idea as HN - raw files on disk - and it runs orders of magnitude faster than a similar sized Mastodon server would. Sadly it's not as fast as HN, but I'm getting it there. :D
Maybe we need some kind of protocol that can spread the load where popular messages are duplicated across the network instead of being stuck on one node that can get overwhelmed.
The irony and tragedy of the Internet is BitTorrent solved Internet Scale at the protocol level, but is at odds with how content companies, ISPs, and Silicon Valley want to organize themselves.
If you cram every social interaction a network has in a massive common distributed store (which is what using a bittorrent like protocol would entail) you have every node requiring to consume gigabytes over gigabytes of content, despite being interested in a fraction of a fraction of it.
I don't know if nostr or scuttlebutt resolve this issue, but if they don't ... how do you imagine a mobile app for keeping in touch with your grandma, requiring gigabytes of data transfer and storage would work?
At this point people saying bittorrent is a solution for social networks are basically just the guys who know about hammers and seeing nothing but nails.
I say irony because we had all these scaling problems two decades ago during the peak P2P years, including federation and implicit DDoSing, and BitTorrent emerged as the lasting protocol because it could handle the scaling issues.
I say tragedy because for this to work you do need some openness, which puts people at risk of content companies trolling for you, ISPs dropping you, and is completely antithetical to the control Silicon Valley demands over its users and data.
There were some plans at one point for another project which would deal with music and would host the media on IPFS. Sadly I've never seen any progress on it, despite the idea sounding very good.
That way, you solve for the potential hosting issues of smaller hosts not being able to handle the load in case of viral posts etc, all without the clients having to know anything about the implementation details.
We've run back than Napster and later eDonkey on those boxes just fine…
You mean like any proper P2P protocol?
Add to this multi-cast on internet level, and everybody could actually operate something like YouTube on their internet router…
But of course economic interests of some (already ultra rich) minority will prevent that forever, even we could have it just right now form the technical standpoint.