People are naturally tribal. Leaders are integral to the ActivityPub model, in which people accumulate around charismatic admins. It's not really a centralizing factor as long as people can move between servers (they can't really on ActivityPub; you can murder your whole ship).

It's interesting how people talk about Mastodon admins being worse than Big Tech jannies. Usually they are, but it's not an inherent flaw in human nature or anything, it's just that Mastodon as a project attracts people who are childish, narcissistic, and dramatic. It's totally possible to be a balanced and reasonable admin, although it gets harder as the community grows. Which brings me to the next problem of Mastodon being maximalist software architecture. It's great for sites like Truth Social who can throw money at the problem to scale, and terrible for sites with 10 users because they can't afford to keep hosting it.

But we have to recognize the ways in which the model helped the Fediverse explode. Which is why I'm trying to strike a balance with Ditto. Mastodon's community model on top of a network where users aren't held captive.