Auto Friend Everyone until maybe 10,000 members?

As I get ready to launch a site nationally what are your thoughts about friending everyone for the first 10,000 then allow it to resort back to picking your friends?  It seems greeting a site off the ground has to be very tough indeed and if everyone is friends right from the start would spark an easier start up environment?  Wold love to get some thoughts on this from people who have several thousand members.  How did the first months get things started? When you spread it out over the states you could have thousands of members who only have like 50 in a single state spread through out the state... Any thoughts like auto friending everyone for the first 10,000... 

I'm not sure what all modules you have, but I found that when member have a large amount of friends, it would slow their accounts down. And that was/is just for a few members (only like 30-40 have 1000+ friends), plus my admin account which I had auto friend everyone... but after 20k friends I couldn't stand to use the main admin account anymore as it took about 3-4 minutes just to login to the account.php page. So with everyone being friends with everyone, it's going to take a hit on resources as it's going to have to notify everyone for any little bit of activity...

I ended up purging my friends list on my main admin account and it is much better, but that was on 7.0.9 and I'm on 7.1. now... but I'm not sure it would make much of a difference...

That is a point; if you have tens of thousands of friends that are actively posting and you have any sort of friend notification, then the report is going to have a huge amount of entries.

Seems to me auto friend came about in the good old MySpace days (remember that site). Since then it seems to have lost popularity, and isn't that attractive anymore. Friend them automatically or not at all. Most average people or members won't even notice. It only takes 2 seconds to follow, like, friend, or what have you someone so I don't see the point of forcing it. People will friend you if they want, if they don't want to no big deal.

i know you are family orientated, but can you imagine the security risks involved with automatically friending everyone - you get a 16 yr old who is automatically friended with someone who may not have good interests in mind.

The idea is a cool one, but may be more troublesome than its worth.

Great points and thanks for the input from all of you...THEY ALL make great sense.

I really think this is what I am after and really solves the issue I had in my mind...