The paradox of Mastodon is no one (not even mastodon.social) likes mastodon.social dominating the network, or Eugen G being the sole arbiter of extensions to the common protocol,
but on the other hand, ultimately, the reason we all use Mastodon (IE, the part of the Fediverse people think of as "Mastodon", modeled on the Mastodon extensions to ActivityPub) instead of Secure Scuttlebutt or identi.ca or whatever is because Mastodon was the AP implementation that had one person's singular vision.