How could alt.games.football not scale, and /r/football scale ? I wouldn't expect a single server, or even a single network host the whole conversation about football in the world. So you'd have reddit.com's alt.games.football, facebook's alt.games.football and so on. Or, more probably, brand new hierarchies like com.facebook.games.football and com.reddit.games.football. The nice thing is that they'd all have the same interface and the same protocol so they are both easily accessible and easily archivable.