Not just that, it is also the distributed and transient nature - one instance can become far more popular than the next far easier than a twitter clone can. This makes it hard to gain and sustain traction on the platform not designed for it. Extreme example is 8chan kind of boards.

Imagine how twitter will be if it never displayed any counts - followers, like, retweets etc nothing is shown to the user, even if they used all of it in the background, just by not showing it will have enormous impact on user behaviour.

Linkedin did that by not showing connection count beyond 500, to dis-incentivize people from making connection requests like facebook friend requests.

Architecture in Mastodon case makes it not attractive for influencers as compared to other platforms(IG, twitter etc) where they have higher Return on Effort put in.

More like deterrence by "poverty" - if you don't have anything remotely valuable to them to exploit you don't need any security.

Soon to be followed by similar posts about DDG and Firefox.