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This is an odd minority viewpoint for HN actually. I find most people feel rather empowered by the decentralized nature of mastodon… or email for that matter.Mastodon is decentralized at the protocol level. It's the opposite of that at the social level. The mob rule may be "decentralized", but it turns out it still sucks. Cross one extremist and get accused of being a bigot / -ist du jour, and them and their friend will run you out of town. No big deal, you say, you can always switch towns? Except no, because the extremists will follow and denounce you for your "bigotry" / -ism, and threaten to do the same to anyone willing to harbor you, and then no town will want you in, because none of them want to be cut off of everyone else. On the main subnet, it's every instance pointing a gun at every other one - even if most believe the common rules are extreme, no one trusts others enough to challenge them.
The irony is, this is basically rediscovering the lessons of past thousand years of civilization. Mastodon is the digital equivalent of a sea of towns afraid of their own people and other towns alike, due to roving parties of political officers executing criminals and wrongthinkers alike. Somewhere along the way people figured that rule of law, presumption of innocence, due process, proportionality of punishment, civilization, are nice things to have.
Anyway. Been there, done that, tried to enjoy it while pretending there is no problem, until the admin retired the instance. I don't feel like participating again. I'm off both Twitter and Mastodon. As much as I hate corporate ad-poisoned Internet, I do have to grant it that it's the more honest one - people will do bad things to each other in pursuit of ad revenue (or revenue in general), but at least they're not pretending too much. They're not bending their own minds past breaking point to feel OK with delivering mob punishment and signalling allegiance to not become targets themselves.