The problem with a network this small is that, to a certain degree, the network is close to being just one large community, instead of many overlapping smaller communities. With federated systems it's more obvious that the people you might strongly disagree with come from different domains, which just also happen to be able to communicate with yours. But I think a network without this required affiliation needs a certain minimum size to become home to a truly diverse set of people.

I think both community-focused software as well as non-social-media use cases are the solutions in the end. If Will can't post stuff like that without it affecting new users, then the entire protocol is DOA, isn't it?