Which is a very different situation to "blast out the photo to 1000 instances". But even then, not all of them fetch and cache media on receipt of a status (e.

Which is a very different situation to "blast out the photo to 1000 instances". But even then, not all of them fetch and cache media on receipt of a status (e.g. mine don't) and they're not fetching them at the same time according to my logs. You may well still end up serving 1000 copies of the photo (or even more if people aren't caching) but it's 100% not "blast out the photo to 1000 instances when you post" - it's much gentler.