Is it a problem though? There are thousands of email providers you can choose form, and they still work fine for sending and receiving email.

An email provider as well as mastodon provider can:

• Read incoming messages
• Block me from sending messages to specific people
• Block me from fetching content I want

Can I choose another email provider that will let me do what I want? Yeah maybe I can find one, or maybe I can run my one, but then these big email providers they’re gonna start blocking or throttling self hosters making it infeasible or extremely incovienet to run your own email instance.

Not to mention, there’s a financial + time cost to setting up your own email/mastodon instances that most people won’t bother with.

Look at Bittorrent or Plebbit as an example, running a full p2p node is literally a single click and nobody can censor you. The barrier of entry for self hosters is much lower.

One your point on power law, the fediverse is pretty healthy.

Mastodon social controles a big chunk of the network, that’s not healthy imo. That’s a huge power of the network.

imo moderation of the network should never be at the center, rather it should be pushed to the edges of the network (users). I like Bluesky’s model of subscribing to someone’s labels of the content, and maybe we’re gonna have something similar in Plebbit as well. In Plebbit currently you can choose which communities you subscribe to, and you can also filter by NSFW and other tags, so you’re not really forced to see content you don’t like.

Also community owners set the rules for their own communities and enforce it however they like, there are no global admins.