I'm advocating it as the content distribution layer, not the social interaction layer. You don't even need all of the metadata, as there are BEP extensions to distribute that as an index [0] or an RSS-style feed [1]. Images are particularly painful, like the previews in Mastodon, because they hammer the origin server rather than looking around at what other peers have. This problem will only get worse as the federation grows in size, both in users and in servers.

I say irony because we had all these scaling problems two decades ago during the peak P2P years, including federation and implicit DDoSing, and BitTorrent emerged as the lasting protocol because it could handle the scaling issues.

I say tragedy because for this to work you do need some openness, which puts people at risk of content companies trolling for you, ISPs dropping you, and is completely antithetical to the control Silicon Valley demands over its users and data.

[0]: http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0049.html

[1]: http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0039.html