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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.
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.
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.
I would be very sad if I was randomly assigned an instance in French (for example) because I don’t speak French.
How's it work if I get banned from one instance? Yet I can still comment in that instance I got banned from? No clue how that works
Just joining in, and what will happen if the instance you created your account on decides to stop running. Does your account just dissapear?
Yes. But it is easy as hell to set up on another instance or even throw up your own.
If you get banned from your home instance, you're banned everywhere.
If you get banned on a different instance, you can no longer post/comment/vote in communities there but otherwise you're fine.
stupid beehaw 3:<
Beehaw kind of seems like a problem child. Like, the first thing I saw about them is that they were de-federating.
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.
I applied to 3 instances when I decided to join and lemmy.ml was the only one that responded so there's that.