I think a number of other people have tried and it turns out mastodon isn't a very good piece of software. Gab was based off mastodon for along time and what th

I think a number of other people have tried and it turns out mastodon isn't a very good piece of software. Gab was based off mastodon for along time and what they found was it's just not set up to scale, and they were constantly removing features during peak use to keep the servers from crashing. Pleroma is written in elixir scales a lot better (which is why all the biggest instances like poa.st use it) but fundamentally you're still dealing with a lot of overhead sending and receiving messages from other servers. I think something would have to fundamentally change with the API if it wanted to grow past a few hundred thousand active users.