I must have missed the part of internet history where people were constantly banned from their emails by capricious administrators for vague ToS violations.

Like we are rightly concerned about Google suspending accounts without recourse, but the rate at which they do that is still orders of magnitude lower than the personal fiefdoms known as Mastodon instances.

The beauty is it doesn't matter if some mastodon admin is an asshole, you can be that asshole or find someone else who isn't.

I'm not aware that this was a common practice in periods of early email adoption.

> I must have missed the part of internet history where people were constantly banned from their emails by capricious administrators for vague ToS violations.

I have friends on Mastodon for some 5+ years and this isn't really an issue. If it actually keeps happening than either the instances you're picking are run by teenagers, or you're actually engaging in some sort of a behavior that perhaps warrants a ban?

Personally, am running my own instance so this is not a concern but the larger ones with good reputation tend to be mature about this. I'd recommend joining a well established instance but avoid the absolutely huge ones like mastodon.social

Well you first got one from your Internet provider, and after that there were a few huge ones (Hotmail and Gmail).

I don't think most people feel they "chose" their email at all.

This is probably how the fediverse will turn out too

It was! Now we are down to a very small number of default instances for most people. I'm one of the weirdos who doesn't use Gmail (Fastmail ftw), but Google's ad-subsidized email really decimated the competition.