I see that now the website shows a simpler choice - join mastodon.social or choose another server. I don't think it was like that when I joined (maybe 2 or 3 years ago), you were just given a list of servers or a search and told to choose.
This is an improvement for average user onboarding - although if almost everyone clicks mastodon.social, you kind of lose the value of decentralization, right?
The time to have an opinion on which servers are cool and which host the fun people you follow is not the instant you go to sign up. Over time, you can notice which servers have buzz for bad moderation vs good, or where half your follow-list lives, and consider moving then
Having it take longer to form an opinion isn't exactly a negative either. The longer you take to pick a new server, the longer that server will have been around, and the longer it'll likely continue to be around.
I think there’s still value to having a long tail of independent instances, which can readily become more dominant if something happens to compromise the primary mastodon.social instance.
This is an improvement for average user onboarding - although if almost everyone clicks mastodon.social, you kind of lose the value of decentralization, right?