My dream for Mastodon is for it to be a viable choice as a publishing platform for any creator. In other words, for people to not feel like they're locked in to Twitter or Instagram if they want to be professionally successful.
@Gargron for that to work it needs to be able to switch hosting providers while taking your own domain name/id with you, which probably means that virtualhosting is a hard requirement. switching servers needs to be like switching email providers - followers don't notice