I see we are now debating whether Mastodon should have quote-tweets, whether quote-tweets are inherently bad, to what degree Mastodon should be like Twitter, etc.
I get that folks have strong feelings about this stuff—and often have those feelings for good reasons—but it is really just just window-dressing.
Connecting individuals at scale to a non-trivial fraction of all the other individuals on earth is bad. The closer any of these platforms come to doing that, the worse they will get as vectors for fraud, harassment, abuse, and violence. Certainly there are mediating measures the platforms can and should take, but in the end, the only way to really deal with the problem is to keep them from getting so big in the first place.