No way would i use an iphone. I outgrew its capabilities in 2010, spent 3 years not updating until i could get an untethered jailbreak and finally gave it up in 2013. I have helped people with iphones and ipads since then and nothing has convinced me to go back.

I dont think so. As an example, take the !technology@beehaw.org community for example. It can have say 1000 subscribers from lemmy.ml but only needs to send content to lemmy.ml once as it comes in. All 1000 subscribers see the cache copy from lemmy.ml and a message is only sent back to beehaw.org for comments, votes, etc. With everyone having their own instance beehaw.org would have to send updates to each one instead of sending an update to one instance and 100 users seeing it. A good level to strive for is many small communities of say a few thousand (1-5 thousand or so). That way one single server doesnt get to massive but federation requests arent overwhelming instances either

Sadly no video platform will ever stand up to yt without creators. Odysee is the closest and thats only because youtube bans decenting opinion about topics