If you want to try out fediverse, be prepared to spend a big sum on hosting and domain name, or don't expect any freedom. And remember to be a good boy and put your personal information when renting an overpriced domain name. See more about how much it sucks
And the maintainer of a server needs control over what is posted, but i assume you make a switch to have freedom, and you don't get it on 99% of providers. Freedom is not for normies, otherwise there wouldn't be this fight for basic rights.
Mastodon is meant to be federated, but is it easy to host it yourself? Not for personal use. And really, it doesn't scale well, but i guess it can't scale well, because you have to moderate everything, otherwise you will get defederated from most instances.
I don't like depending on some people being nice, but social media largely depends on networking effect. Are the most people on mastodon friendly or reasonable? If not, then why spend time with them.