But this other way?
Right now, it mostly depends on the kindness of strangers, and it imposes a somewhat significant additional cognitive barrier to entry.
Picking an instance feels hard. Self hosting can be complicated.
Remembering that your username has to include a URL (and that you might end up with a username like kenkyuusentaipodcastrangers@meet.communitymedia.network that takes up two full lines of the compose box? That's hard.)
Being responsible for outages, for backups, for infrastructure, for Payment.
It's all hard.