Ugh. So many small things that are wrong here. Mastodon isn't a single thing. It's many different town squares all trading their posts around. Gab is actually

Ugh. So many small things that are wrong here. Mastodon isn't a single thing. It's many different town squares all trading their posts around. Gab is actually a part of it, despite what most instance operators want - if you REALLY want to be "on Mastodon" and "on Gab" at the same time, you can self-host and do that[0]. Truth Social isn't "on Mastodon" only because Trump's goons turned off federation and blatantly violated AGPL. I suppose that both disproves and proves the original author's point. Technically speaking, Mastodon is still a "town square". But its users do not want that, because at scale, town squares become endless voids of shouting and toxicity. Even a decade ago on Twitter I was already unfollowing people and tailoring my timeline based on my political preferences. Pre-Musk Twitter's censorious behaviors were almost certainly a reflection of the users' own desires and not some kind of diktat sent down from on high onto an unwilling user base. [0] I have no guarantee that you would want to stay on both at the same time.