> The most important one is that both your identity and your data are tied to whichever instance you pick [...] (i.e. the fact that you can't "port out" from an uncooperating server) really isn't [forgivable], in my view.

You can "soft-migrate" to another Mastodon account and server my creating your new account, then pointing your old account to your new account.

All the old content remains on the old account/server, and all the new content/notifications appear on the new account/server.

They have a "soft-migrate" (as opposed to a "hard-migrate" where all your activity would be migrated across to the new server) because Mastodon is built on the ActivityPub standard which has more than just Mastodon using it. Since it's an open standard, there are already proposals underway to allow the hard-migrate behavior, but it would be able to support Mastodon and all other compatible ActivityPub apps, not just Mastodon by itself.

> Mastodon's approach is firmly stuck in a past where sysadmins completely rule their respective kingdoms, and that distinction runs deep to the core protocol level and is, I'd argue, not fixable.

I see this as a feature, not a bug.

I'd rather have a reddit (before the great '23 moderator purge and subsequent death spiral) style moderation where each fifedom (e.g. subreddit/mastodon instance) has it's own rules and moderators that actually care about the designated content (e.g. cooking, gamedev, etc...) in their fifedom where the moderators are part of the community and the community can discuss and vote on rule changes.

As opposed to:

A facebook style moderation where the mods are a faceless corporation and where reporting something equals a filling out a form of preset answers which don't allow for further explanations and having maybe 3% of anything actually getting fixed.