An interesting problem:

I've been hearing from a lot of folks that "I'm trying to sign up for Mastodon and it's not letting me / it's confusing / it's a mess / it's broken"

When I inquire, these folks are always using a mobile app to sign up

My sense is ... many mobile apps are bad *in general*, and their signup is *particularly* broken

I tell these folks to sign up using a plain 'ol browser and it works

I'm now switching my "hey, sign up!" advice to insist on using a browser

@clive Good advice. I set up my accounts using the desktop version and decided to hold off using one of the apps. In part, it was to force myself to go at a moderate pace getting acclimatized, etc., but also to save myself some grief if the app or apps were, well, not so great. So far so good. I might just leave it to desktop only for the time being ...
@bookgaga yeah that’s how I’m doing it!