i think right now the protocol and the people who run popular mastodon instances are being treated as the same thing - mastodon.social and various affiliated servers are trying to build a community based around a certain set of values and type of content, and feeding all of tumblr into that might cause some drama.
it's unquestionably good for the protocol to have more people using it. but it might not be good for mastodon.
Mastodon.social and other large instances certainly aren't working to build the same focused, higher quality communities that smaller instances thrive on.
This is part of why many instances block the large, poorly moderated instances.
it's unquestionably good for the protocol to have more people using it. but it might not be good for mastodon.