@joepie91 If we want folks to find a happy home here, and tell their friends, it's important that they see content that makes them feel like it's worth sticking around for.

The "choose an instance" is a HUGE onboarding hurdle, but the difference between a good choice and a random one is the difference between staying and bouncing.

@masukomi It's a tricky one. My hope in linking to joinmastodon (with its categories) is that it'll get people close enough to a community they care about, without spending much energy on picking a precise instance - and that they'll "graduate" to a more exact choice later on.

I honestly just don't know whether that'll work, but I've seen *a lot* of people bounce off on analysis paralysis, so provisionally I'm ranking "easy choice" slightly higher in importance than "accurate choice"...

@joepie91 yeah. The initial “analysis paralysis” is probably a bigger problem than the “good instance” but i think only barely so.

It’s just… not good. I love Mastodon. But that initial choice is just such a huge roadblock. An invite to a friends instance is bad too because then the larger instances end up with an exponentially larger burden (CPU & $$).

Doesn’t help that Mastodon scales radically worse than Pleroma, and admins can’t switch server tech seamlessly