One literally only has to choose an instance and create a an account. How is that hard? It is literally Twitter a la carte.
It's because it doesn't do what twitter does. That thing we all hate when we're aware of it but love in our subconscious which is push us towards content we will hate-watch or hate-consume, whatever. You have to actively seek out communities. At least that's how it was when I was using it like all two times I did.
So my actual answer is "it isn't hard, people just use that excuse to explain away the fact that they don't like it because it isn't addicting." This applies to me too. I want to be force fed hog shit down my throat so I can come here and complain about it.
Social media is plenty addicting even when you don't have a corporation hiring people explicitly to make it more addicting.
People don't get what "it's like email" means, and even if they do they're trying to sign up on arbitrary servers that they pulled off a listing that might not even be open for registration, to a website with a possibly bespoke UI they can't find tutorials for. A number of people navigate phones and computers through very specific steps with icons, like people who still can't get online without clicking on an "e" icon in the exact spot it's been for twenty years.
Once registetered, posts are hard to get. If you follow your friends, you might not see any of their posts because your instance has not federated with their instance before, none of their posts from before you followed them will be visible. And that is only if the two instances have not gotten into a huge beef and defederated, making interactions impossible - with you, the user, not likely knowing that is why you can't add your friend. And lots of instances defederate from large instances, especially mastodon.social.
You simply cannot expect a normal, well adjusted person to possibly navigate that web of grievances, especially in a Twitter format where you're primarily an individual following other individuals, socially unconnected to your instance but beholden to years of internet mod slapfights about that time an instance only warned instead of banned someone for posting a picture of food without a CW - or for literally talking about being black and not CWing it because liberals didn't want to be reminded racism is routine.
I don't allow myself to call people stupid, it forces me to try to actually think through the actual factors at play. I think most people simply do not care as much about posting as we do and are unwilling to put in the extra work to be a poster, especially if that work is emotionally draining to avoid a "bad" instance you picked because it has a cool name and a topic you liked.
i forgot that literally the app you have to download to actually use the thing called "mastodon" is a pile of shit. everyone tells you it is bad and that you should actually be using bullshit like Fartle or iOS exclusive Sheen but they all have their pros and cons so you'll need to try them all and decide for yourself. you pick one. it cannot currently handle DM's. you have to download a separate app and follow its installation instructions to get notification support. someone tells you the creator abandoned it six months ago and is also mastodon cancelled for saying the gamer word. you log off. the instance you were on is unable to process the request for six hours because it was running full fat mastodon on a raspberry pi 3 in someone's closet.
I think a common misunderstanding among normies is that you have to make an account on every server you have interest in. That's what my partner thought at least
I guess you are refering to the classic book by that name? Which advocates for smooth user interfaces in computing.
i don't think the premises for this line of thinking are very solid, honestly. any intuition a person has about using a computer is based on a random combination of explicit and implicit training on whatever computers they happen to use at school, home, and work. tools require training and practice to use. corporate software forces people to adapt to random UI changes constantly, so people tend to be hostile to anything new that's optional because the computer is kind of implicitly hostile. i have a hypothesis that users would actually find it easy and potentially interesting to learn a totally alien computer system if they could be convinced that it would never ever change on them.
Following people on other servers can be a bit of a hassle compared to Facebook/Twitter/et al. I still don't think it's anything crazy, but I can see my parents having an impossible time figuring it out.
I mean, it's technically higher than twitter, but more importantly once you've been raised on a constant feed of forced content the idea of having to seek out your own can be a difficult one to grapple with.
