Problem is that a) new users don’t know that they can join communities across servers, and b) it is intuitive use start with the servers that a lot of people like.

Instance browsing and onboarding is probably the biggest challenge to Lemmy’s growth. The current experience either scares new people away, or encourages them to congregate on a limited set of instances.

[–] nattekrant@feddit.nl 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If the registration process just picked a random instance for you, maybe something nearby, and assured new users that they can visit communities and interact with users across instances, very few would pick the biggest instance.

[–] _cnt0@feddit.de 17 points 1 year ago

That isn't guaranteed, though. The other day I wanted to create a new community and was browsing instances on join-lemmy.org/instances for an instance that was compatible rulewise. The one I picked evidently wasn't a good pick (burggit.moe). Trying to advertise my new community, I found out it was defederated from beehaw (and likely others) and got insulted as a pedophilia sympathizer ...

Randomly assigning new users to instances would make a substantial fraction of people very unhappy.

[–] StringTheory 2 points 1 year ago

I would be very sad if I was randomly assigned an instance in French (for example) because I don’t speak French.

[–] mangel@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 year ago

It's also that lemmy.ml is the instance I've seen posted everywhere when it's brought up, so naturally people would just sign up there instead of finding somewhere else.

[–] Jaximus@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

I applied to 3 instances when I decided to join and lemmy.ml was the only one that responded so there's that.