[danijelb]

The government shouldn't provide that service to ordinary citizens, same as they don't provide email hosting on government email servers. I think it helps if you think about Mastodon as email. Government runs their accounts on government server, other users can interact with their content from other servers.

As for people caring about a server for functional programming or some other niche, I believe this is just a temporary state of Mastodon and ActivityPub because it's such an early and experimental technology.

I believe that in the near future there will be multiple large corporate hosted social networks supporting ActivityPub (running on Mastodon or something else, doesn't matter) and then the choice becomes clear for an average user - who do they want handling their data. There could be a Google activitypub service, something from Facebook (they said Threads will support it), different media companies could run their services. Phone networks and ISPs could offer ad-free instances bundled with internet and phone plans. And, of course, there will still be a ton of small niche communities owned by enthusiasts for a variety of topics.

Celebrities and companies will most likely host their own instances, because an account on an official well-known domain acts as verification.

The fediverse itself will be a neutral ground.