What you describe is, of course, possible. You can create a personal fidonet/usenet-like echo conference with nothing more than a bunch of e-mail redirection rules. But people don't want that. I checked.
There is no such thing as an "intellectual need". All the needs are fundamentally emotional. Mastodon addresses the identity need, it creates the sense of a community, and, as all the social media, it grants both cheap entertainment and immediate gratitude for conformity. It is a good "social network", it's just what we call a phenomena of "social network" is essentially shit.
> the social network itslef [sic] should be as boring and generic as possible.
Well, in a certain sense, he is describing one mechanism of the peculiar popularity of sites like 4chan; however, I think it just highlights how incomplete the thesis is. There's clearly much more to it than just these simple mechanics.
There is no such thing as an "intellectual need". All the needs are fundamentally emotional. Mastodon addresses the identity need, it creates the sense of a community, and, as all the social media, it grants both cheap entertainment and immediate gratitude for conformity. It is a good "social network", it's just what we call a phenomena of "social network" is essentially shit.