my understanding is you don't get server to server interaction, but there's an intermediary. it's supposedly designed to make things easier at the edge of the network, but my skepticism leads me to think they will just end up being choke points.
it's hard to get people to care about decentralization. it basically has to be forced on us, or most of us will use Amazon etc. I worry about mastodon dot social for this reason too, but here it's almost like setting up WP. not with BS.