To be fair, if you want content on Mastodon, you have to actively go out, find people, and follow them. After you get past that Step 1 of signing up, your home page is empty. There’s no algorithm that automatically deposits content on the main page. You have to do a little bit of work to get anything. As you say, doing this work is not that god damn hard, but sadly for about 80% of people (maybe more), this is an impassible barrier.

On the bright side, once you do get past this barrier, none of the Mastodon content that you are getting is from that bottom eighty percent.

Also the first barrier of picking a server (how it works, the rules of every instance, checking who they federate with) and an app (the will to test multiple apps, learning that to login you have to input the server url manually since most aren’t listed in the apps), to the people who read all the things it’s tedious but doable, for the rest it’s “Which one is the RIGHT choice?” and just stay at the door.

These kind of posts don’t help either, because it makes people feel like they are too stupid to join and rather stick to the known services, but omit all the actual process that someone has to go through.

the will to test multiple apps, learning that to login you have to input the server url manually since most aren’t listed in the apps

I don’t get why everything needs to be an app. Mastodon’s (and Lemmy’s) web UI works perfectly well in a mobile browser.