[lokedhs]

> We did see Gab fall under too much server strain, but it's essentially a centralized version of Mastodon.

Mastodon is a quite heavy application and it's arguable that it was never really designed for high-volume traffic (it's supposed to be decentralised after all). Also, I believe Twitter had a lot of performance issues and it took them years to fix that, despite having a ridiculous amount of money available to them.

Gab could easily have embraced federation (but, I presume, only with like-minded instances since no decent instances would want to federate with them) but they decided they wanted to be another Twitter, but without the resources of Twitter.