If you have not followed any of the conversations on Mastodon in the past then it could be more difficult to understand. Let me just try to summarize this a bit. I give credits to Gargron to pulling off Mastodon and being an example for other to give a boost to Fediverse development (Before Mastodon there were a few things but all a bit niche kind of. Mastodon then profited from a few Twitter, Tumblr and what not Exodus moments to get more popular). But other than that Gargron should have taken responsibility. As far as I remember the Mastodon app was just pointing to dot social at some point, nice for masses of new users, but not in the spirit of decentralization (Going from one silo to another ? And yeah, simply migrate to another instance, not every person will do so) You cannot point confused masses of people to just your flagship instance, and do no moderation. This has all improved by now. Now imagine that your own nice instance got several thousands of users (I think I remember that https://social.tchncs.de/explore went over 20k users in 2018 with the first Twitter Exodus causing some initial server troubles. Today the same server shows 4K active users). What would you do ? In case of the Mastodon social flagship I believe they eventually hired moderators. Ironically Gargron is quoted here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(social_network)#Content_moderation