I don't know the underlying architecture of mastodon, so forgive my naive question, but why wouldn't rate-oiniting be a solution in this instance? Or if one believes they're under attack by a large group of people by aimpling registering and posting 1 post, then rate limiting won't be affecting, so they could realistically pause registration, right?
Please correct my misunderstanding.
the admin can just ban elon and set the instance to invite only, easy
But does this really address that issue? I see this as an attack vector really. Let's say Elon isn't happy with the competition. He can join a small server and force them to either increase hosting fees or to shut down. That's really the point of the author's comment and the relationship to scaling.