Lemmy is better for on-boarding on this front as they have the Local and All feeds from the start. Just having that front and centre (defaulting to Local, as you don’t want to overwhelm them) would be a big help.

Yup, Lemmy does it really well.

So how about 2 big points: auto-selector (based on location) and answer a couple of questions.

I think that’s totally fine. The big point is that the user shouldn’t choose a server. Answer a few questions that can lead to a server? OK. But as soon as you make someone choose you might be reintroducing that confusion that seems to not be very popular with normies.

While I’d be fine with an auto-selector (as I help Admin feddit.uk), it would miss out on the variety of instances out there - books, games (video, tabletop, etc), franchises, etc that some people might be looking for.

Here, I’ll point to this thread by Ted Curran: indieweb.social/@tedcurran/113946323075198755

Also, this reply thread lemm.ee/comment/18473212

Ted talks about how it might be best to simply send people to one instance (a sort of starter instance) and then encourage them to move to a different, more specific one. Other users complain that account migration is insufficient.

Maybe, after improving account migration, we should send users to a few semi-random starter instances that have agreed to a certain set of rules and adhere to a set of quality standards, but then encourage them to leave by migrating their account to an instance that better matches their interests.

From what I’ve gathered with the replies I’ve been getting, this might actually be the best solution, for now. Though, of course, it does include a significant improvement over the tech side, rather than relatively simple UI changes…