@richpuchalsky@mastodon.social @PhoenixSerenity@beige.party And I would certainly agree with that critique. There are also a number of ways that this capacity can be significantly reduced on the infrastructure side.

If identities and account content were managed in a decentralized manner, on-device, the ability of instance owners would be significant reduced. If you take this far enough, they'd have almost no power. See: DeltaChat, which is a good example of a communication platform that offers very little power to the instance/relay holders.

The problem I have, then, is that your understanding of hosting a mastodon instance as "inherently suspicious" is so out of sorts with the observable incentive structures at play, as I see them, as to actually weaken your critique.