@kissane@mas.to Great post. The need for tools to help people pick an instances is another affordance issue that's been discussed for years with no progress in any of the main code bases or even sites like SpreadMastodon (which just sends everybody to .social). It's frustrating because .social is unlilkely to be the best landing place for most people -- its huge size makes it hard to find people with similar interests on the local feed, there's no geographical clustering, etc. There's a lot of focus on reducing the barriers to signup by removing a difficult choice of front, but it's optimizing for the wrong metric: it maximizes the number of people who sign up and then having a bad or meh initial experience, and then running into all the migration problems, so not only decide to bail but tell their friends about how irritating it all was.

Of course one underlying dynamic with why Mastodon migration hasn't improved is that priorities are driven by Mastodon gGmbH, which runs .social ... so if it got easier, they'd lose a lot of users. @tokyo_0@mas.to's work on Mastodon Content Mover is promising, but it'd be a heckuva lot easier if the core platform supported it!