I think we are all saying that Mastodon is meaningfully decentralized and there is no single party that could pull the rug from beneath the whole network. This

I think we are all saying that Mastodon is meaningfully decentralized and there is no single party that could pull the rug from beneath the whole network. This is what instances bring to the table. Bluesky may be architecturally beautiful, but it’s not decentralized in practice. (See https://arewedecentralizedyet.online https://arewedecentralizedyet.online for example.) And we know what tends to happen to important centralized services.