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?
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.