So, it's exactly like signing up for gmail if gmail was down and you had to either wait for them to fix it at some undetermined point in the future, find another email provider or set up your own email server instead.
But I think that's the important point. Right now, there's nothing wrong with Mastodon. Mastodon is working fine. A couple of servers that people commonly encounter first are having growth issues. But those servers aren't Mastodon any more than Gmail is email.
I would further say there's a marketing problem that Mastodon advocates keep saying this situation is normal, expected and it's working fine, which is obviously quite offputting.
And that's what a lot of tech people don't get, to normies actually Gmail does equal Email and such. You're not going to get the bulk of everyday people on these platforms until you think in their shoes and provide features (and don't have downtime on your main servers) that fit their experiences.
I'd love to hear of some evidence for that. I've never encountered anyone assuming that the bit after the @ has to be gmail.com, or being unclear and uncertain if they can communicate between their work Outlook account and their home Gmail account. This feels very much like someone's taken the idea "to most people, the internet just is the web" and run wild with it.
GMail was invite only for a very long time at the beginning fwiw
And in the end, people (who left willingly) ended up back on twitter anyway just because people kept sharing things from there. But also because the alternative services could not keep up with the momentum, resulting in degraded service. So everyone seemed to collectively go "meh" and returned to twitter.
I predict everyone will be back on twitter once all this blows over, and especially if alternatives can't keep up. Uptime and reliability seem to be more important than features, freedom, or just about anything else.