alt Hacker NewsThat friend is not the only moderator who can impact your account though. Someone else on the instance you're on might do something silly that gets it defederated from a ring of 100+ other instances that share a blocklist. You might have friends on those instances you can't communicate with now. Do all 100 of those servers expose the admin's email? Do they respond? Are you going to go through that work in the first place? Obviously not.
It's weird to have to explain this to someone who's used Fediverse services for nearly a decade.
After a ban, it's no easier or harder to make a new account on a new mastodon instance than it is to make a new account on reddit/google/fb/etc. You're never fully frozen out of anything, that's not the point. The point is that gmail will never stop accepting emails from yahoo addresses regardless of how many badly behaved yahoo users there are.
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I find that the "what if a cabal of small server operators defeds your server" risks very frequently overblown, although it is good to be aware of it.
As a correction, though - emails get bounced based on opaque reputation rules (domain-related or otherwise) all the time. Email and fedi are very similar in this respect.
I usually experience this in the other direction, as toot.cat rather aggressively defederates other servers.
It's sufficiently well administered that I'm not aware of any instances defederating it. Where I'm aware of instances being widely defederated, it's almost always been gross abuse and failure of admins to respond in an appropriate or timely manner. I'd left one such instance on account of just such a failure. (Several others shut down, another not-uncommon occurrence.)
Profile migration still has many failings, but it does make moving to and establishing connections from a new instance pretty painless. Losing your old history is a bit of a drag.