Max describes perfectly my experience with Mastodon:

Ok wait, you wanted to join mastodon, what’s all this now? Tildes? Furries? Some Belgian company? Why do you have to apply? Everyone else had that mastodon.social handle - Can’t you just use that? The real one? What the hell is a fediverse?

Confused, you close the site. This seems like it’s made for someone else. Maybe you’ll stick around on Twitter for a while longer, while it slowly burns down.

you can actually stand out of the crowd by simply treating the web platform as what it is: a way to deliver content to people.

The entire thing is worth a read. Also love the quote in there from @TerribleMia

Large companies find HTML & CSS frustrating “at scale” because the web is a fundamentally anti-capitalist mashup art experiment, designed to give consumers all the power.