I also think instances just need to have more sane urls. It sounds silly but like it or not branding does matter. Instances like beehaw and sh.itjust.works just rub me the wrong way during first impressions. Even some of my friends who I've tried to introduce to Lemmy are just like..."what the fuck kinda website are you making me go to?" I am not surprised that lemmy.world is big, partly because the URL actually sounds official.

We also need super-communities that pull in content from multiple communities/instances, better multi-instance search, and a way to migrate between instances before the masses will be okay with smaller instances.

Indeed, and it seems like it's down again

It makes sense that general purpose instances would have the most users. I'm not a programmer so while I could still register there why would I pick programmer.dev?

The bigger issue I had in picking an instance was just in understanding the differences. I think it would help if instances advertised their stance on defederation, moderation, etc... to help people make a decision (or even to see that lemmy.world may be more similar to some other instances than they might think).

Myself and another developer are working on something we think will solve this:

OP: https://lemm.ee/post/2800726 TLDR: Automatic User Distribution

Whenever someone goes to the sign up page, for example, on Lemmy.world, we:

• look at the recommender list
• find the server that is most under capacity
• have a very large iframe with "Sign up for Lemmy (using [under capacity server here])"
• have a small "No, I want to sign up specifically on Lemmy.world" option