Lemmy

It feels like user accounts need to be abstracted away from instances somehow. Federation means it's almost meaningless which instance you register with, and as integration between instances and other Fediverse apps gets better it will just become more and more meaningless. It should be possible to just "Join Lemmy" and have the servers behind the scenes handle spreading the load. You should be able to login to Lemmy from Beehaw.org or Lemmy.ml or any other Lemmy instance. The way it works at the moment is kind of like content is global but accounts aren't and it feels like it should be the other way around?

Shamelessly plugging my https://lemmy.cafe instance.

While the other recommendation in the thread are good, I think they are hard to implement things that will take time.

A quick fix solution can be to add a button on join-lemmy which says something like 'Confused on where to join? click to join a recommended instance' that redirects to the sign-up of one of the recommended instances (there is already a list).

This will allow for load balancing and easier time for people to just come and join.

This was enough for me to start my own instance. It's not too hard with ansible, and Lemmy being Rust it's not needing that much CPU or RAM.

And I'll invite my friends here too. If you're capable of running your own server, do it for your friends. Form small communities and you can always subscribe to the big server communities from your own service.