I view the repeated reply of “start your own server” as a cop out to not address what is fundimentally broken about a service, plus it doesn’t acknowedge that starting a new instance requires taking on a daily obligation of attending and checking that the service is running and immediately addressing in as short time as possible.
Look at the rules of a instance that focuses on a particular topic or industry, they still have rules for public postings or acceptable speech.
Since Mastodon has the capabilty to ban IP addresses and for one instance to ban another instance from communicating with it, that’s using a deny-all rule due to specfic individuals, so everybody on the internet who uses one server do not exist online for people on another server.
Can anyone name a federated service that has built-in encrypted messaging enabled for privacy?