I’ve seen from a lot of people that the biggest gripe with getting started is trying to figure out which instance to sign up with. I’d like to try and make that much less of an issue with a simple user-onboarding process.
What I’m thinking is presenting a user with a normal sign up screen, like you would see elsewhere, but with a dropdown that allows the user to select an instance from a list of options. Optionally, an “advanced” user could supply their own instance. The default list of instances would preferably be decent sized, trusted instances, but would also hopefully get users to stop trying to register on one of a small handful of instances and causing poor performance for those instances.
What ideas do you have?
This is a good idea. Maybe something like the Join Lemmy page where it lists recommended servers and a short description?
I also definitely think an explanation of how things work at the beginning is great too. AFAIK, Mastodon tries to do this in their onboarding, but it’s a bit confusing to read. Something like that, but must better explained would probably be great. Once we (hopefully soon!) get importing/exporting of data, it can be explained that it doesn’t particularly matter which instance you sign up with since you can move whenever you wish.