However, that also adds confusion for someone trying to figure out whether or not to use the service in the first place.

So they need to choose an instance. How do they pick an instance? There’s all this talk about defederation and all of that, so do they need to do a bunch of research to figure out who is where, to register? Oh wait, one of the big instances aren’t taking signups, and another is restricted, based on application.

That’s a lot of legwork for someone who is used to being able to go to “lemmy.social.network”, register, and just go. You don’t have to research Twitter or Reddit ahead of time, to figure out if you ended up in a server-region that was locked out from the others with seemingly no explanation or warning, or suddenly lose access because of some kind of operator issue with some other server.