I agree when it comes something doomed like Mastodon, I bounced right off it. Way too annoying to navigate. Understatement, it’s genuinely unpleasant to use. Your reward for doing so (at least when I tried last year) is a near ghost town with nothing but American politic whining for content. Even worse community than Bluesky where that can be filtered out somewhat.

I don’t think piefed/lemmy takes a galaxy brain to figure out once signed up but yeah even just having multiple choice sign up pages scares people probably. The apps can obfuscate that for their small minds I think long term maybe? I’m also happy to just keep a small community going it’s not really a concern for me. Big population just invites more bad actors.