The number of Lemmy instances are growing and the list on join-lemmy is getting bigger and bigger. There are too many instances on the page and it is hard for new user to find which instance is suitable for them.
In my opinion, the instances should be categorized on the basis of the region, topic, etc. Something also should be done to promote smaller instances and reduce the traffic on the main instance and lemmy.world instance.
Mastodon categorizes the instances and gives a brief overview of each instance.
They should add filters for language and general purpose vs. specific topic; options to sort by size, age, connectedness, and reliability; write a short blurb about the administration policy of each instance (provided by the instance admins themselves); and add an “I’m feeling lucky” button that picks a proven reliable general purpose instance at random and just sends you to it. As well as big, bold text at the top saying “The instance you pick honestly isn’t that important”.
To your last point, imo that is the single biggest hurdle. Initial sign up inherently creates what I like to call menu anxiety. The extra steps and the time involved is contrary to all popular practices. You have to start customizing your experience before you even know what you’re getting into, which is the inverse of how it is done everywhere else.
And then there’s the potential to join an instance that is too small, where existing users haven’t yet subbed to communities that may interest new users. They won’t know they exist (without searching externally) based on the feed. Changing instances isn’t currently intuitive or appealing to regular potential users.
I’m currently okay with how things are. However, mainstream adoption just can’t happen until the devs achieve their goals. I’m a huge fan of their work already. We’re a long way away from 1.0 but I do believe we’ll get there.
I’m pretty sure I’m in a minority here, but I like that lemmy.world is so huge - and think it’s both positive for the lemmyverse and an excellent starting point for new users.
It ties into the new user experience a lot: lemmy.world has a large userbase so most communities will already show up in its All. It’s consistently had new registrations open where many others have closed during large sign-up rushes. It has a thoughtful admin team experienced with running services like this. It’s likely to be around for the very long term and, short of some DDoS attacks, should be fairly reliable.
I know having instances this big is objectively bad if you’re measuring things like how distributed or resilient to disruption the Lemmyverse is, but I think the positives outweigh the negatives on the whole.
If I’m honest, I think the best way to implement an “I know which instance I pick isn’t that important, please just send me to a random one” feature would be to send the user to a random one of the top 5 largest instances. I stopped short of suggesting that because I know it would be deeply unpopular though - enough so that it becomes a bad idea on that merit alone.