Twitter and Facebook have shown that giving some huge corporation arbitrary power over a social network is not a good idea. Centralization creates network effec

Twitter and Facebook have shown that giving some huge corporation arbitrary power over a social network is not a good idea. Centralization creates network effects, which make it so that the owners can basically do whatever they want without losing users. Federation largely avoids this problem. If the owner of my Mastodon instance starts doing stuff I don't like, I can switch to a different one or start my own and still interact with all the same people. (Hell, if the developers start doing stuff I don't like, I can even fork it or switch to an alternative program like Pleroma that uses the same protocol.)