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.
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.
> You don't need to be stuck on a bus between Oslo and Göteborg to enjoy reading this book: [...] Much interesting stuff to think about for the thinking and practicing programmer.
https://toot.community/@bsdphk@fosstodon.org/109829843037038...