@aparrish Depends on what you mean by "scale".
Scale along what metric? Scale depending on what metric?
@aparrish If the software is meant for a computationally demanding task, for instance, like rendering an image or a video, and it doesn't scale along my system resources (like, it only uses one CPU core to work), this is a bad piece of software, because it leaves a lot of its own performance on the table.
@aparrish But the same Mastodon, supposedly scales well along multiple nodes in a cluster if you want to run a large fault-tolerant infrastructure or something.
Speaking of which, centralized web services always boasted how they "scale better". But over time we see that they really don't: Facebook and Twitter don't really scale along their sheer number of users, which causes problems with moderation fake news, political polarization, etc. etc. On the other hand, I see decentralized systems (like E-mail and Fediverse) scale awesomly by individual servers being largely detached from one another. I mean, E-mail is still with us since the 70s, and is used by people of all walks of life. Fediverse spans across all the social and political spectrum.
@aparrish Same with hardware. There's seemingly a threshold to the number of compute devices working in parallel efficiently. It's called Amdah's law. You can only throw so much CPU cores at a problem until you start hitting diminishing returns and adding more resources to the system does almost nothing.
In other words, "scaling" is complex, and demands context. It means nothing without it.