It kind of does matter which instance someone joins, because not everything is federated with everything else.
But that’s not really the point. The point is that potential new users think about joining “Lemmy” only to find a big list of servers that they don’t know anything about, and that scares people away. Giving them an invite removes the need for them to choose anything at all.
KoboldCoterie@pawb.social 2 weeks ago
It does, though, because not every instance federates with every other instance. If someone is coming from Reddit, and they interact with a set of specific subs there, and they want to interact with the analogue communities here, they don’t want to join an instance like, for example Beehaw, that has very strict federation policies, or (probably) .ml or lemmygrad, where they’ll be exposed to stigma they weren’t aware of going in and which might not apply to them.
A list of servers with very open federation could solve this problem in theory, assuming new users knew to reference it, but that might not be what they want, either.
The invite code idea is actually solid, I think, assuming they’re handed out to people who have things in common with the target userbase of the instance, and not arbitrarily.
There’s also some instances that hold united views on specific topics, for example blahaj with trans rights, and someone arbitrarily choosing that instance that doesn’t hold those same views might feel that they don’t fit in.
Obviously anyone can just choose a new instance and move, but for a new user coming in, that’s a ‘quit moment’ in many cases. Giving an invite code to someone that leads them to an instance that at least broadly fits what they’re interested in could help solve for this.