There's a good case to be made that the real service social networks offer is moderation. It seems pretty well established that most people don't want to be in a wild west online, and that's why decentralization fails.

Black-and-white thinking leads absolutely nowhere. Maybe in 2023 we can agree to leave it behind?

I think it's pretty obvious that a self-published blog provides more freedom to publish what and how you want, and that's valuable, even if it's not absolute freedom.

Yes. In Brazil, a single judge can issue an order that makes your website inaccessible to anyone within the country, plus cancel all your social media presence at once. All that in a matter of hours.

There are degrees of everything. At the end of the day, anything can be cut off from the network. But the standards for doing so can differ significantly.

depends on your physical location. and even if it's a rather unfortunate one you might get away with using tor or similar

He must not know about kiwi farms.

One of the most notorious examples of banning was that of Trump from Twitter. He went and built his own. I've seen news report on his "tweets" (or whatever they're called on his platform) as if they were on Twitter. Banned? Yes. Silenced? No.