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Technology
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Really? I just spun up a gotosocial instance on a VPS and was up and running in a dozen minutes. Failing that, I'd have just joined mastodon.social. Why was it a hard decision for you? As a tech person, what about "federated" was confusing? I have a second account on a spoken language-specific server, for kicks; I set both of these up within an hour of each other. I donft understand how it could be considered a hard choice.
Now, the finding people, I could understand, but since I was not on Twitter to begin with, I had nobody I cared about following. I can understand how that would be challenging, although it has nothing to do with your home server selection.
Not the person you replied to, but when a few friends of mine tried to migrate off Twitter, mastodon.social had closed sign-ups. So with the "official" instance unavailable, the issue was that there was a choice at all.
While there's only one "Twitter" or (presently) only one "BlueSky" to join, on Mastodon you suddenly have to decide which instance is the right one to make your account on. Which instance is most likely to stick around for the next couple years? Which instance is most aligned with your interests? Does the instance happen to (de)federate in any way that is a deal-breaker for you? Is the instance moderated well? You wouldn't have to think about those if you signed up to BlueSky.
It's an issue similar to what Linux has with distributions.
There were tools that people made that would find if the people you followed/followed you were on Mastodon and added them so the migration wasn't quite as painful as some here have described.