Federated systems like mastodon where most people are users on a random person’s server leads to similar dynamics. The server admin is akin to a capricious power hungry Reddit mod. For the user it ends up worse than the centralized systems, both in user experience and in things like privacy/fairness.
In urbit there isn’t a distinction between user and server, the ID and the computer are tied together which is one of the prerequisites for solving the problem of why federated systems fail.
The web started as a hyper technical niche, but most users don’t use the web at that layer - they use FB or Amazon. Urbit is currently a hyper technical niche, but if it wins and users use it then they’ll have more control without needing to understand why. Urbit’s design makes it possible to have a path to UX where that could happen (imo). I think that’s not true of any other system I’ve seen.
If the ID hierarchy bothers you, you can also disable over the air updates and manually manage them. Then you’d only use the hierarchy for routing encrypted traffic and looking up other ID keys. The ability to escape to other infra nodes (stars) provide incentives for those nodes not to abuse routing (similar to pressure against an ISP) or they’ll get a bad reputation.