Just playing devil’s advocate: Nobody forced them to take loans from Venture Capital firms. They could be developing just as slowly as Mastodon, but instead they took the influx of cash so they could “move fast and break things.”

It’s solidly their choice to have taken on so much investment money without a plan to pay it back yet. Leaning on growth and then figuring out how to actually monetize it down the road, which is literally not a different path than any previous social media. These are choices they made.

They could have easily found different sources of funding, worked with smaller staff, smaller funding, and slower progress.

They’re literally following the path of every previous social media ecosystem. Get investor cash, enshittify to pay back, profit.