Huh? The default Mastodon app signs you up on mastodon.social by default. Nothing complicated about that:

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/05/a-new-onboarding-experience-on-mastodon/

And the devs faced major opposition for that, because plenty of people accused them of wanting to centralize the decentralized network with that move.

It’s funny to read this article about the death of Digg again:

In reality, Digg changed their business model and pretended that they didn’t. That is something that is unacceptable with communities and won’t be forgotten. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian hit the nail on the head in an open letter to (now former) Digg CEO – Kevin Rose:

“You chose to grow with venture capital and you’ve no doubt (I hope) taken some money off the table in your Series C round. I say this because this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It’s cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to “give the power back to the people.”

https://searchengineland.com/digg-v4-how-to-successfully-kill-a-community-50450>