This goes back to something I've said before:
People's impression of a network is not just the 1P clients. It is a "mastodon feature" because when you are using "mastodon clients" to connect to a "mastodon server" that is the experience of users, regardless of who made what decision.
But I would note: if mastodon hadn't actively _fought_ the implementation of this functionality for so long, it would probably have helped the perception here.