If the fediverse is to be adopted by the masses, the onboarding experience needs to change. A new user can’t be presented with a choice of instances as part of signing up or at least the process of making the choice needs to dumbed down a lot. I don’t know how or if this can be solved, I just know as someone involved in app development and UX that the current experience won’t work.
My mother would not know how to handle this paragraph: “Lemmy.world is one node in a network of hundreds of Lemmy instances. Before you sign up here, take a moment to explore all the instances at https://lemmyverse.net. You may find an instance with a regional or topical emphasis that speaks to you! Don’t worry about being left out; Lemmy instances are interconnected so users from each instance can participate with communities on other instances.”
For mass adoption it needs to be so simple that even non-techie older people can get through it without feeling like they might be doing something wrong.
Then selection of interests and themes should be included in the onboarding process, instead of the mumbo-jumbo about choosing instances.
The onboarding process should be happening after this point. People shouldn’t be going “I want to join Lemmy!”, because that’s kind of a non-sensical statement. Lemmy is a website engine. They should be going “I want to join awesomewebsite.com. Oh, and look, I can see stuff from anotheraweseomewebsite.net, too! That’s so cool!”
If the website itself cannot provide a compelling reason as to why someone should sign up for it, then why should they sign up for it? So that it can be a dumb-terminal for some other website?
This isn’t always the case though. That’s just one example of difference between instances.
Instances can change everything, from being able to view nsfw content, if you can downvote or not, and who you can talk to (big difference between instances federated with ML/grad/hexbear and not. (And then the BeeHaw Defeds make a difference too).