Would it be possible to at least show the total subscribers from all federated instances?

Forums are an invaluable source of information for countless purposes. Even extremely old forum posts can be a life-saver.

Some services run where they are natively accessible through tor, but most don’t.

This was mostly what I was referring to. Does there already exist a sort of “hidden fediverse”? As in a fediverse that is only accessible over Tor/i2p?

I wasn’t clear enough in my original post. I was referring to the idea of creating a sort of “hidden fediverse” which would be separate from the one over the clearnet.

I wasn’t clear enough in my original post. I was mostly referring to the idea of creating a sort of “Hidden Fediverse” which would be separate from the regular clearnet fediverse.

You can connect to most instances over Tor

I was not enough in my original post. I was generally referring to your second point about hosting a sort of “Hidden Fediverse”.

Y’all don’t update your services?

It would put the more popular instances under enormous stress, if they had to serve every single subscriber from any other instance.

From what I understand, media (images, videos, etc.) is not cached. Does that not mean that, in the worst case where every post contained an image, the instance would be serving every subscriber, anyways?

I don’t really understand this reasoning. Some server would still need to receive those requests at some point. Would it not be better if those requests were distributed, rather than pounded onto one server? If you have a server caching all the content for its users, then all of its users are sending all of those requests for content to that one single server. If users fetched content from their source servers, then the load would be distributed. The only real difference that I can think of is that the speed of post retreival. Even then, though, that could be flawed, as perhaps the source server is faster than one’s host server.

Please correct me if I am wrong, but this feels like a flaw with how Lemmy (perhaps other fediverse apps as well, I’m not sure) is designed. Why do I need to store all posts made to a community that one of the users on my instance subscribes to? Would it not be better to simply store my user’s posts, and comments, and the posts made to any communities hosted on my instance? Why do I need to store information from other instances, and users?

it is storage that requires more attention

Please correct me if I am wrong, but this feels like a flaw with how Lemmy (perhaps other fediverse apps as well, I’m not sure) is designed. Why do I need to store all posts made to a community that one of the users on my instance subscribes to? Would it not be better to simply store my user’s posts, and comments, and the posts made to any communities hosted on my instance? Why do I need to store information from other instances, and users?