> if I had to send my post to every single one of my followers’ repositories, that would be extremely inefficent, [..] an additional kind of service, called a r

> if I had to send my post to every single one of my followers’ repositories, that would be extremely inefficent, [..] an additional kind of service, called a relay, that aggregates information in the network, and exposes it as a firehose to others Therefore a company with money/resources to build this relay will be in control if/how the firehose presents my content as a content creator/pds owner. This will create the same imbalance of power you find today with Youtube/Twitch/Instagram/etc. The solution is not to add intermediaries, but to make this dissemination to all of those followers less inefficient. Designing a whole protocol to cater to the .1% of users that might get into the million followers is another level of premature optimization, in my opinion. For the others, sending requests to 10k followers should be plenty reasonable to do with off the shelf computing without requiring protocol level intermediaries like relays. AT protocol, in my opinion, caters to the "scale" crowd and in doing that puts all the power in the hands of the few that can do it better. Instead of democratizing social media, which what a federated protocol would imply, it actually maintains the status quo albeit by changing the companies holding the power.