Most people choose Gmail as their email provider specifically because understanding federation is too much mental overhead. There is no gmail equivalent in the Mastodon space, instead there’s many small instances that are difficult to compare.

But those that do use Gmail are well aware that they can use their Gmail account to write to @anywhere.com, not just other @gmail.com addresses. They already have that mental image in their head.

This is "just" extending that concept to @[email protected], @[email protected], whatever. This user on this site, same as this email address on this domain.

People who use Gmail still have to know how to send e-mail to [email protected] and when asked what their e-mail address is know to tell people [email protected] instead of [email protected]. You don't get to not understand how e-mail addresses work just because you are using Gmail. There is clearly something else broken about how Mastadon tries to do federation if people are having a hard time with this, but you can't blame federated addresses.

The addresses aren’t the problem, most people see an email address as just a unique identifier for the other person. The problem is choosing an instance to sign up on.

I think part of the issue is just... habit. We know how email works because email has always worked like that. But twitter is not that environment currently works like that so people getting confused is sort of understandable.

Honestly which instance is hard because instances can be small. Which means that an instance runner can get petty with federation. One instance I looked at clearly had the owner in some sort of drama with the owner of another instance.

Sure while it may be possible to avoid now, imagine that drama had happened after I'd been on the instance for a year. I wouldn't likely know until I suddenly stopped seeing my friends posts in my feed. Or what if my previous one had shut down with no warning instead of giving me months to migrate. Should a normal person have to back up their data weekly from the site in case it's owner does something stupid?

In reality Federation is cool and all but most people are going to end up on Mastadon.social