Funny, but feels unfair to mastodon (as someone who doesn’t use mastodon), they are definitely not trying to destroy the world and could use donations too!
Honestly by completely ignoring the subject of federation, aside from acknowledging that mastodon’s creators/owners/etc have limited scope to turn evil, they’ve actually done a fairly reasonable job with this one.
The sign up process is kind of user hostile (or at least was a couple of months ago, they improved it a lot). People don't really want to have to figure out which server to sign up to if they barely know what a server is.
They're probably not talking about the actual conversations on Mastodon (although there's definitely some condescension there, like if you dare to post an image without alt text they'll come out).
I feel that about the Fediverse too, despite being highly technical. Picking a server involves trust (e.g. that they won't go offline and take your account down with them), but you're just exposed to a list of servers with no idea who runs them. Plus, the server name shows up in your handle, so it affects one's public persona and people care about that.
I'm on Lemmy through lemmy.ca which feels like an authoritative "Lemmy for Canada", but... it's just some random individual person who snagged the domain name. They seem great but I have no assurance that something weird won't happen with it later.
they're right about mastodon being light on the shitposts. it feels like it has all the self-importance of annoying twitter users, but none of the fun parts of twitter