Something that can happen is:

- increase in fediverse usage
- numbers go up
- small servers crash/grind
- numbers go up more slowly since small servers are down
- unresponsive servers leads to servers that *are* up sending duplicate copies of messages at least a few times until they back off
- numbers go up fast
- bigger servers are stuck retrying lots of messages
- the retries themselves make big servers slow
- etc

I suspect this converges to stability over time though