[tekchip]

There seems to be some conflating of activitypub and mastodon here. Also perhaps a lack of distinction between mastodon.social and all other mastodon instances? There are hundreds if not thousands of individual mastodon instances each with their own hosts and admins. Then there's all the activitypub based micro blogging platforms that aren't mastodon, pleroma, diaspora, miskey etc. Finally all the wild and wonderful activitypub based not micro blogging sites like pixelfed, peertube, bookwyrm, anfora. So who's this "single leader"?

[wink]

My usual take is just like yours, I'm on the fediverse and not necessarily on Mastodon (although one of my accounts is) but I also think that the survival and general wellbeing of the ecosystem is tied to Mastodon-the-software's continued success. It's the only one with critical mass. I know I'm a fringe group and yet I'm not so disconnected that I found anything useful there before 2018 with statusnet and identica.