I think you’re being a little hyperbolic. The facts are that there’s a handful of popular servers that are easy to find, a few that seem popular in certain countries. This is all very very like email, which people don’t have trouble understanding the mental model of. And furthermore, all those popular instances federate with each other, also like email. (I assume there are a handful of politically-fringe servers which don’t federate with the mainstream, which is also not that different than email, where the few services most everyone uses won’t accept mail from any IP without an established good reputation.) this means users don’t really have to ask any questions about who federates with whom. And it doesn’t matter which instance you join so there’s no risk to picking the wrong one. Me, I picked one with a short name for ease of typing, and also picked one where I could get my 3-letter username. (Another thing that sucks about a single namespace: there’s one single “SJP” or “GOB” in the whole world with Twitter.)

So I’m saying that Mastodon’s elevator pitch is “It’s like Twitter but they have different servers, but you don’t really have to care about that because they’re all connected, like email.” That’s not on par with compiling your own Linux kernel like you’re making it out to be.