The onboarding process is certainly inferior to that of twitter, but that's baked into the design of mastodon, and literally cannot change. It is definitely the

The onboarding process is certainly inferior to that of twitter, but that's baked into the design of mastodon, and literally cannot change. It is definitely the single most challenging thing about mastodon, with the second probably being vocabulary choices made entirely by developers rather than anybody with UX experience. On the other hand, as a result of this design, no number of oligarchs can run the mastodon network into the ground, so there are obviously trade-offs. Many mastodon servers do, in fact, have a normal, near-instant sign-up process, although given the huge influx of users, many have switched to manually approve registrations in an effort to control load/costs and keep moderation manageable.