I don't think that anyone serious is asking Mastodon to creating NFTs.
What it is being asked of the devs is to separate the technology from the common applications.
NFTs are more than just overpriced JPEGs being sold by scammers, they already work really well to have permissionless domain names and Decentralized Identifiers.
It would be a great weapon against censorship and it could solve the identity portability problem.
@raphael @Mastodon seizures and takedowns are ugly but necessary. a lot of bad actors out there:
https://www.icann.org/en/blogs/details/thought-paper-on-domain-seizures-and-takedowns-8-3-2012-en
@jon @Mastodon is ThePirateBay a "bad actor"? SciHub? What about Taiwan and Tibet not getting their own top-level domains because of China?
Also, bear in mind that pirate bay still exists, despite all of the forced domain changes. Trying to curb them by censorship does not work. It is as "necessary" as it is ineffective.
@jon @Mastodon yes, but forks also bring more fragmentation, which is not what you want in a part of the system that depends on network effects.
Say you start having some instances with ENS domains getting popular. Will Mastodon push to block these instances on the grounds of "crypto is bad and we will not federate with them?"
@jon @Mastodon not necessarily. In order to have censorship-resistant domain names, you'll have to make changes at some point of the name resolution stack: either get an ICANN-sanctioned top-level domain (hardest, but endgame for ENS and what it wants to do with .eth), or get OS vendors to be able to resolve ENS (hard, but less so), or (easiest) activity-pub servers can extend their implementation of webfinger.
Meaning, Mastodon devs can do if they wanted to.