Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Or, more cynical, reversed: I am convinced Mastodon will be a horrible platform if it grows to a size of e.g. twitter, reddit, and far, far worse if it grows to sizes of insta, tiktok, facebook etc. The thing is Mastodon isn't a platform like twitter, reddit, etc, it's a decentralized network of platforms. A few instances might become popular (like mastodon.social) and become a default for newcomers but there will a…
But these instances are part of the platform. Or, a better term, part of the system. So "doing their own thing" is very limited. Do "too much of it" and you'll be fediblocked. Too little of your own thing and you're essentially getting what the large instances dictate. Sure, your instance can e.g. block meta instances because it dislikes Facebook. But that doesn't isolate you from meta content completely - or even at…
>And this doesn't even consider the numerous malicious practices that one can do (...)
Your argument here seems to be that because most instances are small, that makes them more prone to security issues. And that's true, but nothing you mention here is unique to the fediverse, and all of those risks are still greater with mainstream platforms even with their bigger security budgets and resources. People hack Facebook and Twitter all the time, and millions of people get their data stolen, and misinformation spreads like wildfire. In this regard being decentralized, smaller and able to defederate from malicious instances are features rather than flaws.
It is definitely a flaw in the fediverse that identity is tied to a url and so there's no way to validate an identity across instances, and it is trivial to impersonate someone by simply using their username elsewhere. I think Nostr got it more correct in this regard, and I don't know what could be done to mitigate this at a technical level.
But even then I think that at least the fediverse is a necessary step in the right direction.