Mass adoption isn't necessary for a social network. It's perfectly fine if Mastodon never does numbers on the scale of Twitter. The only way to get those numbers is to optimize for quantity over quality, which means algorithmic feeds pushing rage and clickbait, analytics, bots, influencer culture, and all of the other toxic dark patterns corrupting mainstream social media.

Fragmentation is better. A million smaller, slower, community centered forums rather than a single corporate silo optimized for addiction, psychological warfare and capitalist exploitation.