Back in early 2000s everyone had the same mindset, and look at where it brought us.
Back then we all thought "let's bring normies to the internet, that would be awesome, finally our hobbies will gain attention!", then we finally let normies in, and soon after that shit like Fakebook, Discuck, Goolag whatever etc started accumulating as much power as possible.

Now we have a new case study in the making for those who missed the early 2000s train, which is right here on ActivityPub of all places.
More and more corporations, governments, big name people, and so on are joining in, and already there have been plans to bribe Gargeon (which has fortunately failed so far, but then again it took quite a few tries for WhatsApp to be sold out too), already we saw people mass-reporting like if it were Shitter, which fortunately some instance owners managed to push back against, and we'll likely see way more attempts at a hostile takeover as the protocol continues to gain more media attention.

And I should add, none of the Fedi protocols had these problems when it was still a niche network that all the big tech users and media still made fun of.
Same with the clearnet even; back in the 1990s to mid-2000s the internet got attacked for being "a hub of criminals" or "literally drugs" or "a place for total losers to cope", then the normies came in, and all of the sudden it became "the place to be for everyone".

The one difference between then and now however is that now we have a past example of how it ended up if we failed at gatekeeping, there was no knowledge on that yet 2 decades ago.