I don't get it. What am I looking at?

A few years ago I bought my own easily-pronounceable domain, pointed its MX records at Fastmail's servers, and transitioned away from Gmail. In the 3+ years I've been a Fastmail customer, I have never had a problem with my email being sent or received.

Is it full sovereignty? Depending on your definition, probably not. But it does give me a few things:

1. I'm not contributing to the Gmail monoculture

2. If Fastmail stops being awesome, I can point my MX records somewhere else

Even higher levels of control would be nice, and Gmail is trying to shut down independent operators, but the choices aren't "run your own server" or "give in and use Gmail". There's a spectrum of email sovereignty, and the kind of nearly-complete sovereignty that comes with a personal domain is well within reach of most people on HN.