Hard disagree with this. Email is the example I give people of how federation could work. You can use any email provider and interact with any other email provider effortlessly. This is undeniably an improvement over internal direct messages within a centralized service (i.e. Facebook or Twitter DMs). If you leave facebook, you leave your contact list and message history. On email, if using a custom domain, you can switch email providers or even host your own server without anybody on your contact list even having to know this occurred.
Lots of people have been banned from platforms, rightly or wrongly. You can't get banned from email. You can't get banned from having your own website. You can't get banned from the telephone system. If you don't own your own data, you are at the mercy of those who do.
> On the topic of moderation the very same issue is even more absurd. Some instances want uncontrolled free speech where some instances effectively are pure shit-posting instances which are completely de-federated from the most of the fediverse as a result. Other instances really like to control their content, where some popular ones such as fosstodon ban all languages than English as a result to allow moderation.
These are talked about as problems, rather than being the primary selling point.