There is no central authority in mastodon.

There is no centralized authority on Twitter either, because you can always go and use Facebook. The Web is a federated system where everybody just decided they don't want to talk to anybody else.

Those are completely different products, and you're continuing to abuse established terminology via your personal definitions.

I'm sorry but you don't know better than everybody else about what's centralized and what isn't.

If you make a Mastodon account your digital identity is bound to that one server. You can't move to another server.

Wrong again.

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-one-server-to-another/

And yes, that's a solution with flaws (though, I think followers automatically migrate now too, note this is an old blog post) but that doesn't mean these things can't be fixed. Ultimately federation can facilitate a sort of "data transfer" to an entry new server, automatically, but it's a lot of work that hasn't been completely finished yet.

It's only decentralized up until server admins decide that it isn't, which already has happened numerous times in the past.

If you don't like any of the existing servers, start your own. There's no difference from that and using relays other than a server holds your data rather than your client(s) -- which is a big problem with peer-to-peer stuff.

Email is a terrible protocol by modern standards and the problems of federation show in email pretty clearly, as the majority of people will stick to Gmail and a handful of other major providers. There is no reason to repeat past mistakes.

I've moved providers several times. Email has pros and cons.

One pro over what mastodon has done is that you can use your own domain but somebody else's server, which allows you to reclaim account ownerships/redirect via (basically) changing some DNS entries (which works even if the server is offline/breaks the social contract and refuses access to account migration tools). That could be implemented in mastodon too, but then again few people want to do their own domain management.

People don't choose other providers because Google does it for free and they're a household name. There's not much pressure to go use Proton's more limited free plan or pay Proton or anyone like them.

The saving grace with email is that you don't have the moral police looking through your emails and kicking you from their server when they find something they don't like (outside of sending spam), with Mastodon on the other side they do exactly that.

🙄