Listen mate, the fact that you’re even reading instructions at all instead of chucking the technical stuff aside, or trying to force some unlucky family member to be tech support, puts you miles above most of the people I’ve dealt with.

I had one guy demand I physically come down to his desk for an issue that was “blocking an important report”. It was literally just Windows asking if he wanted to overwrite an old file.

Mostly just the resilience and control. An outage or censorship incident on one node can be contained, isolated, and users can easily go around it.
“Oh no, my preferred instance went down!” switches to another instance with the exact same content

Also, I think some European governments run Mastodon servers for themselves. Which sounds weird, but makes more sense in an IT security context. Their data, stored on their servers, that they manage. No third party business contractors needed.