@tcql its a mistake to treat those as opposing things
One of the main things that drives people away from twitter is harassment, ie its not nice, if twitter was able to deal with this problem it could presumable be bigger.
Secondly mastodon is much larger than gnu social ever was, and why was it able to atract more people? i got the impression that a lot of people joined because it was presented as a nicer alternative to twitter, something that wasn't an option for gnu social.

there is an issue with how big individual instances can be before they are unmanageable, but that doesn't mean the mastodon network cant be big