That's the thing about human intervention: It can't be hyperscale. I think that's a feature, but until we as a society come to the conclusion that not every aspect of life has to be the biggest and the only, we're not going to get there.

about the not-hyper aspect: aren't you assuming some technical factors? for instance, if you assume a central mechanism capable of conducting a realtime ad auction, then yes, going hyperscale is resource-consuming.

without assuming such centralization, we end up with more distributed, even async networks. I'm not sure such a network would even need to be mainly supported by permanent hosts (like mastodon is). It could use more torrent-like ad-hoc mechanisms.