Someone called the dot social instance the bourgeoisie of mastodon, but I originally picked it precisely to avoid playing the elitism game of positioning with the right group, the right instance, etc.
Mastodon's federated structure looks a lot more like human social relations, which makes it more honest, but "lots of centers" isn't the same thing as "no centers" and community is still a deeply toxic dynamic, especially when given direct powers.
I see a future where mastodon's instances work very much like communities in the radical scene -- with runaway unaccountable scene patriarchs who maneuver into controlling the core infrastructure.
It's a mistake to think of "social capitalists" as accumulating only one universally fungible sort of social capital. Social capitalism can function in harsher ways in smaller communities.
If your account identity functioned as a token that you could transfer association between hosting providers (instances), then with a little network discovery elbow grease it would be possible to strip instances of perverse incentives to balkanization, organizationalism, and micronationalism.