> I can sign up for an email right now with a dozen different services and not one will make me complete a mysterious task like "choosing a server"
You absolutely, 100% had to "choose a server" for your email.
To the average user, how do you decide between Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, GMail, Outlook?
This is 100% analogous, except Mastodon also makes it nearly trivial to change your server, with no effort taken by anyone who is already communicating with you. It's literally easier than an email server migration.
You are working under the assumption that people read the phrase "Mastodon" like the read the phrase "email". That is absolutely not true for almost all people. They think of Mastodon as similar to Twitter, and they expect a similar sign up process.
Also, "almost all people" have never heard of Mastodon, and will never hear of Mastodon.
I also think you're forgetting that most people had no idea what "The Information Super-Highway" was, and had no understanding of what an "ISP" was or why they needed to pay a monthly fee to access free content. And tie up their phone line.
People who were on AOL thought they were on the Internet. And Compuserve. Delphi. Prodigy. GEnie.
This is not a new problem.
But it's not like you could just make an Internet account, and just pay them. You HAD to use a federated ISP. And some of those ISPs tried to be Walled Gardens, with a weird side-door that ALSO let you get to "The Internet," but that was mostly porn and weirdos.
I get your intent - that people don't understand what federation means. But you're completely ignoring that we all live with federated email servers. Federated cell phone carriers, too, for that matter.
Once upon a time, you had to go to a college that had been invited to The Facebook, in order for you to get an account.
The beginnings of new things are always complicated.
We all learned the difference between .com, .edu., .co, .uk eventually...
