> On a Mastodon instance, there are also no steps you can take. Your account is banned on the instance — your entire identity goes down with it.

You're constantly looking at it from the wrong perspective. I don't care about the instance I'm on banning me because I am the one that hosts my instance.

What I care about is that I am able to connect with any of my friends without the data going through any central arbiter that can decide what we get to see or not.

And on mastodon, if one instance defederates from me, pretty much everyone else will still be able to interact with me anyway, it's not the end.

> On a Mastodon instance, there are also no steps you can take. Your account is banned on the instance — your entire identity goes down with it.

> On atproto, it depend on whether you’re banned at hosting or app level.

> If you get banned at hosting level (usually something clearly illegal would trigger this), you’d have to find another hosting (assuming apps haven’t banned you too).

This isn't as different as you make it sound. Most people on AT Proto are using Bluesky, so "getting banned" is fundamentally the same for them as getting banned from a Mastodon instance. Conversely, you can just run your own Mastodon instance and the only thing you'd have to worry about is defederation (an "appview ban").