[jdp23]

It's certainly a challenge. Mastodon's development tends to prioritize mastodon.social (Eugen Rochko is BFDL of the software platform and also runs mastodon.social) -- for example, the mobile app now signs people up by default on mastodon.social, and functionality that people running smaller instances have implemented in forks hasn't been integrated back into the main line. So there's the weird dynamic that people generally have better experiences on small instances (as long as they're well-admined) but the vast majority of the current fediverse is on large Mastodon instances. So it'll be interesting to see what happens in response to Meta. There's likely to be a partition, and if .social winds up taking a Meta-friendly position, then the anti-Meta region may be much less centralized.

https://heat-shield.space/mastodon_two_camps.html looks at tensions between people who just want a "better twitter" (which tends to lead to centralization) and people who focus more on small communities (a more decentralized solution).