@J12t You make a good point.

I actually started my own server, because I wanted to change my username on mastodon.social, and the signups were closed at the time.

And I wasn't too interested in researching admins and owners of each instance to see where I should move next.

For me, fediverse does give me this kind of control, but arguably this comes with an actual monetary price, plus required technical knowledge (less so with the various managed hosting providers, but you still have to pay).