Mastodon nowawdays is absurdly easy to sign up for, too. The official app (the way most newbies will find it) defaults to mastodon.social, and users never have to deal with anything involving Federation. From the user's perspective the "Mastodon" app is identical to the official Twitter or Reddit app etc.

It absolutely boggles my mind how there are still real live technology journalists that claim it's "too confusing". Like yes "instances" and Federation is def weird, but not knowing how the technical backend stuff works doesn't detract from the experience in the slightest.