@cwebber it's entirely possible I'm missing something egregious here, but I don't understand why "everyone fully self-hosts" implies "everyone sends messages to everyone". (Which is what I understand from what you are saying, maybe wrongly.) Is there something in ATProto that intrinsically forbids a distribution scheme where everyone receives messages from a single upstream feed and delivers them to N downstream feeds? (Yes, I see a lot of problems with this, but not the O(n²) one.)