I've seen from a lot of people that the biggest gripe with getting started is trying to figure out which instance to sign up with. I'd like to try and make that much less of an issue with a simple user-onboarding process.
What I'm thinking is presenting a user with a normal sign up screen, like you would see elsewhere, but with a dropdown that allows the user to select an instance from a list of options. Optionally, an "advanced" user could supply their own instance. The default list of instances would preferably be decent sized, trusted instances, but would also hopefully get users to stop trying to register on one of a small handful of instances and causing poor performance for those instances.
What ideas do you have?
We need a one-line explanation (I cannot find words to distill this), demonstrating that instance selection is entirely arbitrary - users need to not only believe it, but understand it intuitively, and quickly. And it's not intuitive to most persons' Web experience (With every internet decision I have made since IRC, the domain at which I hoist my flag, has defined the content available to me. Why would I register with an instance that hosts only thirty users? Don't I want to be where the other people are? Hang on, if the choice is arbitrary, why am I presented with a choice at all? Surely I'm missing something. No, I don't understand this, and so just in case, I should put myself where the other people are. If it wasn't better over there, they wouldn't all be there. Hang on, how do I hop between instances seamlessly? Why are there instances? What even is an instance? Why am I here? Who am I?)
Just address those concerns in ten words or less, and problem solved! XD (I may or may not have had the same questions)
Instances are like the different houses of Hogwarts; No matter what house you're in, you're still a wizard (Harry).
But I'm not a wizard, I'm just Harry!
We may have struck gold here.