But projects such as Mastodon put control in the hands of site or node administrators, and at least on Mastodon, there's an exceedingly healthy culture of blocking sites which themselves advocate oppressive practices.
So those looking for an uncensored microphone may be somewhat disappointed.
I welcome their tears.
Oppressive, but defined by whom? I've seen arbitrary blocks of instances simply because they run Pleroma or Soapbox. In fact, my own instance was briefly on fediblock.org's list because my bio says "I care about freedom—both in software, and in speech"; the reason stated was "free-speech". That's absurd!
As is often said on the fediverse, some switched over from Twitter due to too much censorship, others due to to little.
I think censorship is a game where everybody loses eventually.
All you need is for the definitions of various words to change over time. And then you find yourself on the wrong side of an (arbitrary) line. Then you get deplatformed.
I'd say think carefully before you open that door, and walk past that particular dangerous line, but our "platforms" seem to have driven their mobs/herds over that line, with nary a thought to what comes next.
The slope is slippery. And we are gathering speed. Whilst people cheer the actions.
Hopefully we have mathematics and physics on our side.
That's an issue, not a feature.