I think a major source of bad Mastodon takes is that people are used to a totalizing, Facebookian idea of why social networks have value; Facebook (purportedly) has value because every single person you know is on it. But from a lot of perspectives, this is a misfeature. People fail to grasp how Mastodon can have value when it's about participative communities and not about mapping your entire social life onto a digital space.