The first step is completely different from anything else you've ever done

This isn't really true, you already had to do this for email. Never heard of that being a barrier of entry.

My parents prefer to opt for local privacy/security focused email providers, while I go with gmail for the feature set and design. But I used to try out a few different ones to figure out which one works best for me. Still use a hotmail email for my Windows account.

I fail to see how this is different to the situation with lemmy/kbin instances.