How different is this from explaining switching from AOL to GMail?
This is exactly what happens on Mastodon. Some servers get added to a blocklist because of one user’s/admin’s vendetta against another group of users, for their politics or other characteristics.
As you might expect, there’s a basic stratification between people who run Mastodon servers on their own: there are the highly politically active, socially brutalist sysadmin hackers, and there are the fresh-off-the-boat Twitter users who sign up for a turnkey hosted Mastodon experience.
Guess who ends up dictating who gets to play in the sandbox?
Some servers then make subscribing to those blocklists mandatory for other servers, meaning your server gets auto-hellbanned if it doesn’t block all the same sets.
The whole concept of globally namespaced public toots is pointless (imo). The only reason these social networks exist is because email solved the spam problem.
And asking your mom to switch email addresses/providers and learn a whole new interface is probably not the example you want to use... People clung to Hotmail/AOL for YEARS, sometimes a decade.
Maybe do a bit of research and don't sign up at shitty instances? The only reason I have seen for blocking instances if they're alt-right, racist, transphobic or harassing people
As Mastodon grows bigger and blacklists grow it will be more a competitor or add-on to existing niche forums/communities IMO.
It’s not really a public social network in the spirit of Twitter… even if they figure out the UX/UI issues (which I’m skeptical will happen soon, that usually takes core leadership, it’s rarely tacked on afterwards).