2/ First I want to acknowledge that signing up to Mastodon has fundamentally changed since I first signed up.
When I joined, I simply went to mastodon.social, clicked "Create Account", and it was easy.
But mastodon.social has been struggling, and so have several other instances.
The "typical" instances aren't available, which means the majority of people are going to joinmastodon.org.
And that's where the trouble starts!