[krapp]

>For non-techies like me, Fediverse accounts and mastodon.social are non-starters.

You can literally sign up for a Mastodon account on mastodon.social or most other instances through the web like any other website. It's no more difficult than a Reddit account.

[bookofjoe]

2 things:

1) Neither I nor most non-techies have a clue what an "instance" is.

2) Reddit banned me years ago for no reason I could think of.

[krapp]

1) literally millions of people, many of whom are non-techies, have figured it out, just like they figured out what "subreddits" were and what "tweets" were and the specific quirks of numerous other platforms.

2) yes the people who own servers get to decide what happens on them. That isn't a feature (or bug) of the fediverse its just the way networks work. But if you don't want to join an instance you can get one hosted on a service like masto.host (the one I use) for very little.