I don’t really remember signing up for mastodon so I tested it.
mastodon.social -> create new account -> agree to terms -> username + email + password -> click email verification
It’s literally standard. Maybe in the past it was worse I vaguely remember giving up maybe a year or two before I made an account on mastodon.social.
Its not by the same dev. Tavi seems involved via the git commits but the project seems to mostly involve someone who goes by relan and another called IratePorcupine