I've seen lots of discussion on reddit of users trying to get others to join Lemmy and the prevailing reply is that it is too difficult to navigate and comprehend. Having to answer multiple questions and wait for manual verification is combersome and is limiting growth at a time when nothing should be standing in Lemmy's way. Combine this with server/instance selection analysis paralysis, and you get my point.
The linked mastodon blog post sums up my thoughts, but the TLDR is essentially this:
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Don't let dreams of decentralization interfere with the greater goal of achieving the network effect.
We should all be telling people to go to lemmy.ml and sign up. The devs should be too, and they should rethink/remove the questions and waiting period. Hell, just put a captcha. Discussions about servers and analogies to email as an example of federated service we all already use is a waste of breath. We shouldn't have barriers to entry.
Thoughts?
EDIT: I've just found kbin.social and find it has superior signup options. It's just: make an account (email/password), or sign up with Google or Apple. No server talk. Upside is the layout is nice and it acts as a Lemmy instance (threads) as well as a mastodon instance (microblogging). Only downside currently is that their android/iOS app is in development and isn't ready yet, so desktop only.
https://github.com/ernestwisniewski/kbin
https://kbin.social/
I think this might be the better recommendation for newbies at the moment.
You can still simply go sub to the large communities even if you're not on that server though.
I'm curious to see how that whole hierarchy pans out, how will servers organize, will it end with basically if you have a large community you have a dedicated server for it, but maybe people actually prefer to register with a server that they identify with more from a locality or mentality perspective, rather than topics?
We can speculate but ultimately it'll be a natural evolutive process. I know for myself I picked something that I felt would be general purpose and I suspect a lot of users would feel similarly.