For the majority of commenters: UX is not UI.

The poor UX experience is the research a person has to do before they can even participate. You need to have a basic understanding of how the network works, and then you have to shop around for a server.

It’s enough friction to prevent people from on-boarding and that’s not good for a platform that needs people to be valuable.

They didn’t, they signed up for gmail.

They actually sell a service where you can buy a domain name and have it set as your username.

It’s not centralized, it’s also not a federated network like AP. It’s just a different design.

Not quite true. You can host your own personal data store (PDS), run your own labelling service, and you can host your own feeds.

The big relays and app views are the only thing that aren’t really supported by the official app yet.