Wow, this is a bonkers project, love it!

Thanks, this is the way to go. Since my project is for research and testing purposes, however, I might check out multiple setups and compare results. A follow-up post sounds about right.

I need a bit of spare time to start working on that soon-ish.

Excellent, thanks for sharing your journey. Some servers could “never handle it” because of all the caching and redundancies?

Slowly I am becoming aware of the limitations of Mastodon, which are also closely related to the managament, it seems, shy of listening to the people. Rebased sounds like my favourite so far, although GoToSocial, as mentioned by @slowwcore@lemmy.fmhy.ml (and folks on Masto) is also worth exploring.