I'm very late to this, but I don't think that would actually be a problem for small instances (like mine) because of the way federation works.

Your instance doesn't federate all activities on the whole fediverse, it doesn't even federate the activities on whole instances (unless you use relays). Fedi only federates the activities from the actors you follow and the activities that directly interact with yours. Everyone else's activities are not federated so they don't really have an impact on your instance's load, making the number of users on a different instance generally pretty irrelevant.

The only actual reason you might perceive an increase on load is that since there are more people on the network, you might get some more followers, but since we're talking about just one instance being added, if my understanding of the protocol is correct, this wouldn't be a big problem since your instance only has to make one call to tumblr's inbox indicating what actors your activity is to be delivered to ​​

@blake By replying to @fediversenews, you are participating in the group. That is, you’re sharing your post to what’s considered a group actor.

See also:

codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src…

Mastodon doesn’t officially support groups, but Friendica does. However, Mastodon interprets group sharing as boosts.

Remember: while Mastodon is part of the Fediverse, it is not the Fediverse.

fep

Fediverse Enhancement Proposals

^Codeberg.org

@Blake Leonard @Chris Trottier Is it part of an existing thread?

It's important to know a few things. First, #Friendica isn't a brand-new group attachment to #Mastodon, it's a wholly separate social network project and six years older than Mastodon (2010 vs 2016).

Second, Friendica doesn't use #ActivityPub internally. ActivityPub is an add-on that was developed years after Friendica's initial release.

Third, therefore, Friendica doesn't know what "unlisted" is. "Unlisted" is an ActivityPub invention and not included in Friendica's internal protocol.

Fourth, Mastodon threads are series of posts. Friendica threads are like a blog post plus comments. This model doesn't support changing access rights (e.g. from public to unlisted if Friendica knew unlisted) in the middle of a thread.

Fifth, this also means that if you reply to a post that's somewhere in a Friendica thread, your reply will be pulled into the thread, no matter how, even without mentioning the group.