On the topic of Pleroma: we should be careful not to repeat the mistakes of the past made by the developers of Mastodon. We aren't trying to build "the Pleroma network" as a self-contained community. Rather, we are seeking to introduce some friendly competition and diversity of choice into the ActivityPub federation ecosystem. Here are some reflections upon the philosophical differences between Mastodon and Pleroma.

Developers are not heroes or infallible leaders. We should not try to design the software so as to attempt to constrain the behavior of our users, like Mastodon does by purposefully omitting certain features. All we can and should do is design it as a tool that provides the most utility to users, whatever they want to do. Some parts of the Mastodon community have spread many misconceptions and misguided ideas about privacy on their platform, as well as the idea of "protecting vulnerable or marginalized users" through design or policy.

Unfortunately, there is only so much we can do about these kinds of social problems as developers, especially when working with standardized protocols. We should not try to insert intrusive features or a conspicuous lack thereof where it would make the core functionality or experience worse. This is different from the concept of "safe design" in engineering, which does not normally deal with social, interpersonal problems, but with problems attributable to accident or mishandling. Individual instances, administrators, moderators, and users must take responsibility for combating abuse and other social problems via policy. Any other "solution" involving technical restrictions creates more problems than it solves.