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Did you use this: https://joinmastodon.org/servers ?

I used it and found a decent one, managed by someone relatively local and active. Most of my followed accounts are on other servers but I haven't seen that as a big issue.

I agree that there's a barrier, but it's not huge. Mastodon really could use some people versed in marketing and onboarding. People use email without realizing that it's decentralized, I tried to draw parallels between that and Mastodon to my friend, but I failed.

I'm honestly not much of a social network user, but I signed up with universeodon and it seems to work fine as a mastodon server. Most of the people I follow are on different servers anyway, so I didn't worry so much about finding a server that was a "good fit" for me.