People post really extreme controversial things on social media, and those are the things that everyone comments about that draws all the attention on both sides. It's the nature of social media.

Mastodon is too impractical. It's like Matrix messenger. Who wants to roll their own server? Mastadon's like Truth Social and destined to be an echo chamber of people who believe in it's technical excellence or really don't like Elon, but average people or companies don't have Mastadon accounts and that isn't going to change anytime soon.

You don't have to "roll your own server" to use Mastodon, you can literally go to any instance's website and get an account and start using it.

But which instance should I choose?

I'm not being sarcastic. It's just really easy to use most other social networks. I go to twitter.com or facebook.com or whatsapp, and I make an account.

Mastadon is not user friendly. It's like which instance do I choose, does that instance align with my values, does that instance interconnect with all the servers I want to interconnect with, does that instance interconnect with servers that I don't want to interconnect with, will that instance be available in 20 years and I will lose all my connections if it doesn't?

My perception of signing up for mastadon is that it's a giant research project in how to sign up for mastadon that I don't have time for. I could be totally wrong and incorrect in my list of questions, but that's my perception and why I think it's unlikely that mastadon can achieve widespread adoption. If I can't easily figure out how I should sign up for it, what's going to be the catalyst for adoption?

Whichever you want. You can even pick more than one.

I don't know why you're overthinking things so much. Why are you worried about whether every instance and individual aligns with your values, or whether a server will be there in 20 years? How would Mastodon be a "giant research project for how to sign up to Mastodon?" What does that even mean?

If you don't want to join Mastodon, fair enough, but you (along with a lot of people on HN) seem to be falling over yourself making it out to be much more difficult than it is.

Almost everything in this post is wrong. That's quite impressive.

Human nature rewards controversy, so there is no getting away from it. The reward is attention, and whether that comes in the form of likes or shares or comments doesn’t matter.

As long as there is some way of determining attention, people will use controversy to get it.