No one called it a paradise. That's a strawman argument.
I've been using my own domain for my email for over two decades. In that time it's been self-hosted, hosted with Google, and hosted with Fastmail. I control it, so I can take it wherever I want. I've been able to take my full message history with me too.
It has not been a "total failure" with spam/abuse either, though I'm glad to have Fastmail handle that for me these days.
In any case, I'll take the tradeoffs over a centralized system.
Same position here, and having the ability to move my domain is by far the most important to me. And also why my medium to long term plan is to move my Mastodon setup to my own domains.
> though I'm glad to have Fastmail handle that for me these days.
I get less spam in my Fastmail account than on my remaining Gmail accounts, but far more importantly for me: I get far fewer false positives with Fastmail. The amount of real mail that used to end up in my Gmail spam folder made the spam filtering pretty much pointless because I ended up going through the spam folder daily anyway.
But that's enabled by the DNS MX record. There isn't anything like that for social AFAIK, so if you wanted to do the same with your mastodon account you are hosed. Some people are saying once you have million followers on mastdon.social, you are not going to restart from zero on mastodon.net. You can, but it's hard. So centralized or federated, without handle portability, it's not very different. You are stuck. It seems to me federated mail and federated social are similar for people who don't own their DNS entry (gmail addresses), but for people like you, that's a substantial difference. You'd have to run your own instance to have your own social handle, and that isn't portability, that's DIY. It only works for a small number of techies, you have to have an instance and a domain.
I've been using my own domain for my email for over two decades. In that time it's been self-hosted, hosted with Google, and hosted with Fastmail. I control it, so I can take it wherever I want. I've been able to take my full message history with me too.
It has not been a "total failure" with spam/abuse either, though I'm glad to have Fastmail handle that for me these days.
In any case, I'll take the tradeoffs over a centralized system.