I hate gatekeeping so much, but what I'm about to say is going to contradict that statement so much I should probably stop typing and start this post again....
Anywhoo....
If a troglodyte can't figure out how to sign up for the fediverse, then they should stick to CorpoChat
I never got the argument that it's hard to sign up to. I think the main issues are that people want content from media entities that may not be present or welcome - legacy media etc. This could be where threads.net fills the gap but then it sounds like they will be blocked from a lot of instances.
I have worked around it via press.coop but they don't cover everything. I also follow more journalists directly than I did on Twitter. I don't miss Twitter and find Mastodon more informative but I'm sure that's because of the information I'm looking for.
When I first made an account I did it on Lemmy.ml because that's what I had heard some people talking about and didn't know it was one several Lemmy instances. I wasn't aware that ml stood for marxist-leninist, and switched over to the the other I knew about .world.
I can see the average joe joining the wrong place and seeing an echo chamber or an essential empty isolated instance then forming their opinions on the fediverse around that.
From what I know they chose that specific domain because communists have a thing for Marx and Lenin (go figure). It might have been cheap/free but I'd imagine there's other cheap free domains they decided against in favor of .ml because of the connection.
It's also that ML was a very cheap domain because Mali (the country which the TLD belongs to) was not actively policing the use of the TLD until recently.