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While selfhosting email in the low-level sense of your own VPS and installing your own mail server software is frustrating today, I find this is relatively rare. More common (besides personal Fastmail/Hotmail/Gmail) is to own your own domain but pay a webhost. E.g. Fastmail or Google Workspace with custom domain, or a webhost like Hover, Gandi, Squarespace, GoDaddy, etc.
This benefits from a larger-scale spam filter, whilst also having complete autonomy over who uses it and what they use it for, plus the ability to transparently move providers if you wish, plus the freedom to pick your email client (eg. Thunderbird with full and offline copy of your data), plus it has resulted in thousands of large domestic webhosts around the globe, not a handful of international ones only.
It's not as decentralised as everyone managing their own software packages on a Rasberry Pi buried in their backyard, but it certainly allows anyone to do that if they want...
To draw the analogy with Mastodon, I could see us avoiding having only a few big Mastodon sites plus some self-hosted ActivityPub sites if we lean into the web hosting model. There are already major players like Masto.host, who could eg. offer centralised anti-spam measures in the future.
Anti-spam could also be decoupled from hosting, such as the case with blogs. E.g. you can self-host WordPress, or choose a professional WordPress hoster. The later is still orders of magnitudes more decentralised than everyone on WordPress.com, and anti-spam can be offered by the hoster, or through a plugin like Akismet that contacts a differerent shared service for that of your choosing.
Mastodon already supports relays and webhooks that are being used to share block lists between like-minded instances, allowing you to be closely integrated with a community (including populating eachothers federated timeline) whilst still being hosted separately.