Email did alright with users choosing servers.
Gmail, Outlook, iCloud… nobody picked a server.
And certainly there was no concern that if I pick the “wrong” one, I may not be able to receive email from one of the other big providers.
Oh, there certainly was no concern I might end on a email server with an ideology I don’t agree with.
The email service of your choice is the "server" you've chosen. If you go directly to a mastodon instance (the "server") the sign-up process won't require you to choose a server.
You choose a service (server) and then sign up there. The sign up belongs to a server, not the server to the sign up. You can't ring a door bell before picking a door first. ;)
Now, you may see it differently and want to offer an explanation. I'm sure your explanation would be coherent and rational. But your explanation means nothing to the average user. They click 'sign up' and expect to sign up and get to using this new website called Mastodon they heard about. And when they realize it's not that simple, many will abandon the process. It's a simple as that.
The term "Mastodon" means, to most people, either "a website just like Twitter " or, more likely, absolutely nothing.
Is that difference, and the barrier it presents to new users, somehow unclear?
Yes, people might be expecting a single corporate entity called "Mastodon, Inc," but that's why the (very poor) analogy to email is bandied about. You have to pick a service provider in order to use email (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc), and you have to pick a service provider in order to use mastodon, too.
Twitter, Inc, is the single provider of the twitter service, but that's falling apart because there's no way for the twitter service to route around the damage being done by Twitter, Inc's new owner.
Chose a server:
1) GMail
2) Yahoo! Mail
3) Outlook
etc...
> 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.
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.
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...
You keep saying "users" when you should probably just say "I," but maybe you understand it a bit better at this point. The onboarding UX is atrocious, mostly because people want it to be something it's not, and partly because developers often don't do UX well. But the UX isn't going to change, so focusing on helping people understand how and why it works the way it does seems more important than cursing the design.
You're welcome to stick with Twitter, Inc, if you want a single oligarch to control your chosen microblogging service and everything about it. Or you can venture out and pick a server that supports the mastodon service instead.
And who knows? Maybe someday a big company will grow a giant mastodon server so that something like 30% of all mastodon traffic happens there, just as with Gmail and email traffic[0] today.