Encouraging everyone onto a single instance kinda defeats the purpose, and I feel it's not as much of an issue with the new join-lemmy.com redesign, which recommends an instance based on your interests.

I wrote up this post for anyone to reference to help onboard people to lemmy.

[–] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I guess, but I haven't noticed a whole lot of point in picking an instance of interest, since a small amount of content comes from them all right now. I added a ton of instances to my feed so I've never noticed tchncs prioritized or specific to myself.

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

If everyone dogpiles into a single generic instance, it could push that instance into unsustainable territory financially (especially with a mass exodus), unless the user base is willing to donate to support the instance. Spreading the load out over many instances would ease the load on any one server admin.

[–] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Maybe make an auto sorting pool that instances sign up for and just evenly assign new users an instance, so they don't even have to "try hard" to choose one, then?

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 0 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I feel like the local community aspect of small and medium sized instances is a pretty big plus of lemmy. I can click 'local' and get a nice view of what my particular community is doing at the moment, which happens to be things I'm interested in.

Is it truly that off-putting to new users to pick a single category that interests them, then their language, then just pick one of the suggested instances at random? There's even a 'general' category they can pick if they simply cannot decide on any other interest.

Every other social media site I've signed up to, including reddit, has made me select from a list of interests before letting me use the site so they can populate my feed with related things, presumably to enhance engagement and stop me from growing disinterested too quickly.