I feel like the local community aspect of small and medium sized instances is a pretty big plus of lemmy. I can click 'local' and get a nice view of what my particular community is doing at the moment, which happens to be things I'm interested in.

Is it truly that off-putting to new users to pick a single category that interests them, then their language, then just pick one of the suggested instances at random? There's even a 'general' category they can pick if they simply cannot decide on any other interest.

Every other social media site I've signed up to, including reddit, has made me select from a list of interests before letting me use the site so they can populate my feed with related things, presumably to enhance engagement and stop me from growing disinterested too quickly.