Because Google never randomly hellbanned emails sent from AOL addresses. And AOL never auto-deleted emails sent from Google. And people weren’t banned from creating an account on one service if that service knew the same person had an account on their competitor.

This is exactly what happens on Mastodon. Some servers get added to a blocklist because of one user’s/admin’s vendetta against another group of users, for their politics or other characteristics.

As you might expect, there’s a basic stratification between people who run Mastodon servers on their own: there are the highly politically active, socially brutalist sysadmin hackers, and there are the fresh-off-the-boat Twitter users who sign up for a turnkey hosted Mastodon experience.

Guess who ends up dictating who gets to play in the sandbox?

Some servers then make subscribing to those blocklists mandatory for other servers, meaning your server gets auto-hellbanned if it doesn’t block all the same sets.

The whole concept of globally namespaced public toots is pointless (imo). The only reason these social networks exist is because email solved the spam problem.

AOL doesn't blacklist Gmail users?

And asking your mom to switch email addresses/providers and learn a whole new interface is probably not the example you want to use... People clung to Hotmail/AOL for YEARS, sometimes a decade.