[VikingCoder]

Also, "almost all people" have never heard of Mastodon, and will never hear of Mastodon.

I also think you're forgetting that most people had no idea what "The Information Super-Highway" was, and had no understanding of what an "ISP" was or why they needed to pay a monthly fee to access free content. And tie up their phone line.

People who were on AOL thought they were on the Internet. And Compuserve. Delphi. Prodigy. GEnie.

This is not a new problem.

But it's not like you could just make an Internet account, and just pay them. You HAD to use a federated ISP. And some of those ISPs tried to be Walled Gardens, with a weird side-door that ALSO let you get to "The Internet," but that was mostly porn and weirdos.