People can still be banned on Mastadon, it changes absolutely nothing. In a world where Mastadon becomes more popular than FB people will complain about being banned from the most popular node instead of the most popular http website.

Mastadon is federated, so you can be banned from someone else's instance but you can always start your own instance, or join one where you're not banned.

Right, just like how you can start your own website if you get banned from someone else's, it's servers all the way down. The people complaining about being banned don't care that they can create their own instance, they care about losing access to the popular instance.

The advantage of mastodon is that banning is not monolithic: so, if I have instances A, B, C, D: B can decide (through whatever process it uses for such things) they don’t like A’s content and ban it without affecting users on C and D. But, the problem it really solves is moderation: if I start an instance with 10 friends, moderation of posts on the instance is almost a non-issue that can be handled by a couple admins in their spare time. Handling off-instance posts is more difficult, but you can either maintain a ban list to block a list of bad instances or you can adopt a default deny policy and only federate with instances that have content your local community wants to see. Either way, the Mastodon model seems better because it allows policy to be specified at the “local” level rather than requiring a uniform policy across the network.

> if I have instances A, B, C, D: B can decide (through whatever process it uses for such things) they don’t like A’s content and ban it without affecting users on C and D.

Yes, but this isn't really analogous to the complaint being presented. In the Mastadon world this article would have been titled "A Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them". The author is still free to use B, C, D etc, just like with http websites.

> Either way, the Mastodon model seems better because it allows policy to be specified at the “local” level rather than requiring a uniform policy across the network.

To be clear, I do think an ActivityPub-like architecture is preferable for social networking, but federation doesn't obviate the concept of popularity, it only seems that way now because the fediverse isn't popular, if it ever did become popular then we'd see the exact same complaints when people get banned from popular instances.

The only reason people care about Facebook disabling their account is because Facebook has all the users and their data in its silo. In Mastodon, A disabling federation with B isn’t really the same sort of problem because it’s not a global action across the network.

What A defederating from B is like a website blocking your IP. Facebook banning an account is more like your ISP turning off your internet access.

In theory, absolutely. In practice, I've heard of major instances using their power to dictate "If you federate with $out-group, we won't federate with you". Most admins want to federate with other major (mostly good, popular) federations, so they capitulate.

As such, being kicked from one instance leads you to sign up elsewhere, until a major instance notices and tells your new server admin to kick you out. When you create your own instance, the major instances use their soft power to ensure almost nobody else federates with you.