It’s not really the same, because most services online are centralised, so you’re only putting your trust into one organisation. With the fediverse, you might not even know who’s behind the instance (especially when you’re new), and it depends on trust and cooperation between multiple actors.

You’re sharing trust across multiple servers, code developers, etc. and different aspects of your data and your experience are affected by many different actors, some of whom could be malicious, and whose security protocols, principles, and levels of trustworthiness and reliability are unknown and untested.

In some ways that’s better, in some ways that’s worse. But it’s early days… Given the vast numbers of bot sign-ups and new servers added very recently, there are clearly bad faith actors at work, and we’re going to have to evolve to deal with them.