Is Mastodon really hard to use for most people? I guess there's some very specific scenarios it may be.

Also the article presents a false dichotomy in my view: protocols need services to be useful to virtually 99.9999% of humans (or at least they do in the architecture we have built since... email?).

Who uses email without relying on servers? Where is your selfhosted email box sitting on if not in a hosting service?

Even IRC relies on servers for people to talk to. I love to experiment with protocols that do not rely on servers - secure scuttlebut? - but even ssb relied on some seed peer that provides a service to initialize the peering