Indeed less and less people are using those. And when they do use email, they are using its centralized version, gmail.
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They switch from outlook at work to google at home while sending messages to their son on protonmail.
Your endpoint might be popular and heavy used or you could be self hosting and be the only person using your endpoint. It's decentralized and works for the average person
You could make an arguement of gmail centralizing control in email, but I don't think thats what you are doing.
Mastodon is part of a federated network. Most people who use Mastodon belong to a large server rather than hosting your own, but you can be part of that network without being part of mastodon.xyz. You can join mastodon.social, or any number of those mastodon servers, or host your own. The same is currently true for email.
But they aren't using gmail because it is centralized. The centralization in your example is due to convenience. Unlike social networks where centralization is somewhat core to the system working.
I'd like to somewhat counter this, due to a common complain we see here on HN, and that is running email servers on smaller or self hosted providers is more likely to have delivery problems going to one of the few big providers like gmail that's left.
I would also say that phones are a bad example because while the phone companies are decentralized, the call routing systems have written law behind them to ensure ATT and Verizon actually route calls to each other (and all other companies like CLEC/ILECs).
re. email:
That's a fair argument, but as long as gmail is not the only provider, its not really centralized. It can be concentrated in a specific ecosystem, but as long you can migrate to Fastmail, or ProtonMail, or Outlook mail. There is not the same lockin effects that happens with platforms.