Even if you are still subject to the whims of your hosting company, you still retain a fair amount of autonomy unless you are running a community like Kiwifarms (in which case I find it hard to be sympathetic anyway), or your hosting company happens to be located in a jurisdiction with enforced censorship laws.
Big forums had big hosting costs and required donations from members, had issues with spam, had to source volunteer moderators from the community, etc., just like big Mastodon instances today.
Small forums had few of those issues because the scale was smaller. The problem was not that nobody wanted to run a small forum: it's actually kind of fun to be a forum admin for your friends, and only one person in the group actually needs to be the admin. The problem was that nobody wanted to be on a small forum because it was small.
Now you can have it both ways: a small instance with trivial running cost and moderation demands, but all the benefits of being on a huge forum with thousands of concurrent users.
See also: Discord servers. Administering a Mastodon instance that you pay someone to host is not much more difficult than administering a Discord server. If people found it difficult to moderate a Discord server, why would so many friend groups, gamer groups, content creators, sub-Reddits, and software projects have their own small Discord servers? The answer is that the cost of moderating a small group of people is really small because small groups are easy to moderate, and the main downside of a small group isn't really relevant when the small group can follow and interact with anyone in the huge federated network.
And yet many of them died or, better put, most of the new forums were never born nowadays because communities moved to centralized, managed solutions (Facebook, Telegram, Discord, Slack etc)
Apparently Tumblr intends to implement ActivityPub, so it might be happening sooner rather than later.
One of the benefits of the fediverse is that you can experiment with new payment models.
You're providing a real service to your friends - a mastodon server. It takes real time, real skill and real money (buying hardware or renting a vps) to do this. Your friends should compensate you and it's fair to ask them to do so.
How you do this is up to you.
I host a gameserver for my friends. This is a really nice bit of hardware in a datacenter. It costs me $600 a year directly and maybe 4-6 hours a month. I have about 8 folks who play on it with regularity.
For my friend group, we "compensate" via trading food, either cooking for each other or catching dinner out. That works well for my friend group and I perceive this as fair.
Your friend group may be different. You may literally ask them to throw in $5 a month or maybe you trade services (your barber friend gives you a free haircut on occasion, whatever).
There isn't a magic equation of what is fair or right for your circumstance.. and it's ok to experiment. Part of why the fediverse is good is that these experiments can be run.
The problem presented wasn't how you pay, it's the fact that you pay and take on moderation duties and curation.
Getting reimbursed by friends doesn't change that, and if anything it convolutes the latter part of the problem by leaving the door open to some awkward dynamics.
A centralized group chat that needs funding to stay alive sounds like a pretty awful product.
So it goes.
The point is that people went from an experience where they didn't take money out of their pocket every month unless they wanted to, and didn't have to curate for others or moderate for others.
I pay for a game server and won't accept a dime from my friends for it not so I can feel like king of some fiefdom, but so we can enjoy a game amongst ourselves.
If moderation is the part of that experience that you're cherishing, it's no wonder you can't relate to the complaints others have.
That was basically a vivid hallucination. You offshored the mod work to underpaid contractors in foreign offices and paid by selling your focus and privacy. You didn't have to feel guilty because some nice folks in fancy clothes with a big PR department told you it was cool.
Those folks in the fancy suits are realizing it's too hard to make money that way.
You can still chase that bargain. You will see more and more ads. Your privacy will only get more invaded. Eventually you will have to pay.