No this is my point, Mastodon doesn't solve this problem in the general case. The shift to Mastodon did not solve the problem of social network admins with too much power, because of the lock-in to instances. Most instances are fine, but there have been many that have caused their users a lot of difficulty, and users fundamentally don't own their data.

The way most users use Bluesky is no different, but the protocol is different, and it is possible to not fall afoul of these issues – data is portable, you can choose your moderation, UI, algorithms, etc, all separately rather than being forced to take a whole package and lose control.

See Blacksky for a completely separate stack, governed separately, that is still fully compatible. That's not possible with Mastodon or even ActivityPub.