Focusing on the "protocol" is the limit. Nobody among regular people cares about the protocol, they care about a social media experience on-par or better than what they're currently using. If they have to figure out this whole technobabble mess that is the "fediverse" it becomes a non-starter.
Yes. That would be doing it wrong for mass adoption. Doing it right means that users don't have to care about the protocol.
But there still has to be infrastructure. Instead of reinventing the wheel, a new social network could be built on the Mastodon foundation. There would already be users and there would be an exit strategy for power users if the new network fails. Right now, it's not worth investing time in a new network because the social graph doesn't survive the end of the network. With Mastodon, it would be easy to migrate to a new service.
