Lemm.ee is a great neutral instance and the admin seems nice, you probably made a good choice choosing it over .ml. Glad to see you were not scared away from Lemmy by it. Welcome! It can get confusing, but it just takes time. It's a nice little place, overall and feels more like reddit used to be once.
So you are saying Mastodon won't take off because people need to choose a server but also because having a "default" where majority will ptobably end up is bad - but this is literally the solution to the problem you mentioned
I used to be in the same boat as OP, but since trying to degoogle I (obvioisly) stopped buying Premium and instead buy into Patreon of select creators. If there was some sort of degoogled Youtube Premium that would go towards support of people I watch, I'd much rather opt for that (obviously a very theoretical proposition) - I can support only so many via Patreon, even if all would have a 1$ tier.
Of course, when buying Premium part of my motivation was my comfort. It was comfortable support via Premium or uncomfortable support via ads. Patreon is fine but you can't feasibly pay for one for every creator who's video you watched
I meant no disrespect. I was mainly thinking pre-Vista, possibly pre-XP. Certainly didn't expect someone in their 20s to be around Win 95. Maybe I'm just seeing myself older than I actually am.
I can vouch for lemm.ee being nice