@ErickaSimone @jdp23 I'm sorry to bring up my own ideas unprompted, but I think that promoting Mastodon seemed to make sense while Twitter was a dominant platform, in the scope of wither anarchy (a). Eugen Rochko has actually always made it very clear that Mastodon was a clone of his good old times on 2012 Twitter (which may be enough to explain his opposition to quote posts, which have appeared around 2015 maybe?) (b).

The first hypothesis would have implied a liberal, modular approach to features, whereas the historical, publicly documented reality of the CEO's intents explains his conservative approach.

From this point of view he would have been completely transparent from the beginning but Twitter survivors would have been desperately looking for an alternative for a solid decade, whereas today the #100DaysToOffload challenge is just there.

Denote wasn't a thing in 2016 and Guix was only two years old; Skribilo and Haunt didn't exist; the XMPP protocol had no decent Android client and underperforming E2EE. IMHO, Mastodon isn't as relevant today as it was 8 years ago, whereas the GNU project is more mature and consistent in many ways (not "public launch" mature yet, if this even makes sense from me, but there's a tight community around it, in a post-Canonical era).