It does not have to be "this and nothing else". The main complaint people have with Twitter is censorship and algorithmic curation without transparency. Mastodon solves the first problem with decentralization, and it could just as well fix the second problem with a market for algorithms to apply to your own feeds. And you could still keep the default chronological timeline for those who wish to keep using it this way. Adding more features does not kill your product, it just makes it more flexible for more use cases.
It does not have to be "this and nothing else". The main complaint people have with Twitter is censorship and algorithmic curation without transparency. Mastodon solves the first problem with decentralization, and it could just as well fix the second problem with a market for algorithms to apply to your own feeds. And you could still keep the default chronological timeline for those who wish to keep using it this way. Adding more features does not kill your product, it just makes it more flexible for more use cases.