A few (or even many) companies creating accounts or servers with which to promote their products or services does not strike me as an existential threat to Mast

A few (or even many) companies creating accounts or servers with which to promote their products or services does not strike me as an existential threat to Mastodon, the ActivityPub network, or the wider Fediverse. People don't have to follow or interact with them. Users can block accounts or domains. Server admins can block other servers. I do see other dangers though. Here are a couple bad scenarios I don't think there are adequate safeguards to handle gracefully: Spammers, trolls, Nazis, etc... buy domains and spin up servers in an automated manner for the sole purpose of abuse. We saw that with email and while most of us get fairly little spam now it still isn't solved. To make matters worse, it's hard for anyone with a new email server to deliver to the existing big ones. A VC-backed startup and/or existing big tech company decides to embrace, extend, and extinguish the protocol.