Is it really a “bad” experience?

A “bad” experience is something like applying for a job online, submitting your resume, then manually entering all the information that’s already on your resume into a thousand little boxes. A “bad” experience is trying to unsubscribe from a service that relies on the pain of that unsubscribe process keeping people paying every month.

Having to choose a server is at most a speed bump. Is it a “bad” experience to choose an email provider?

If that mild speed bump is keeping people from joining, that’s fine. If someone cared enough to make some kind of a GUI that hand-held people through the process of choosing a server, that’s fine too.

IMO, if we’re talking bad experiences, ads on Reddit that are designed to look like posts, that’s a bad experience. Ads that are designed to look like comments, that’s a bad experience. And, the feature coming soon of communities locked behind a paywall, that’s a really bad experience.