Yeah this is a good point. There’s a lot of learned helplessness in my opinion. People who don’t want to switch away from Twitter and are used to its quirks (and yes, there are absolutely quirks) are far more incline to throw up their hands and say it’s too hard.

I think it's a bit disingenuous to say it's difficult to sign up rather than it being difficult to protect your privacy while signing up. That's a different thing and the distinction is important to any future attempt to get the general public to adopt FOSS social media.

Twitter deliberately requires too much effort and knowledge to keep your info private. They do that because they know most people either can't or won't go through with it. The privacy-focused software world understands how problematic that is.

Mastodon, because it was created as a tech-first solution without deliberately building user paths for non-technical users, requires to much effort and knowledge to sign up for and use at all. For some reason, pointing out that most people either can't or won't go through with it is sacrilege. It gets met with minimizing statements about how simple it all really is, and stories about tech-naive people they've explained it to, or dismiss it by saying that it doesn't have to be for non-technical people while ignoring the larger discussion about what the FOSS world thinks they can replace with it.

The only people who misunderstand mastodon are the people who misunderstand regular users capacity for complexity in social media, or the complexity of actually using it like users want to use it... A centralized asynchronous way to easily contect with everyone else that uses it. If it doesn't do what end users want in the most straightforward way possible, it will never be what end users use.