One big hurdle to people joining the fediverse has been having to pick a server for their account. To help with this, I created a website (inspired by another website I discovered through this community, see blog post later) that people can use to promote their own server and invite others to join it.
The page lets you also highlight some of the popular fediverse apps.
I LOVE THIS!!! Sorry for all caps, but as you said, this is one big hurdle that a lot of folks run into, and this is a great tool for overcoming that!
One small feature suggestion/request…I’m not sure if this would work with your back end, but it would be really neat if you could get a random server every time you refresh the page, instead of just defaulting to the main Mastodon instance.
Regardless, I’m bookmarking this to share next time I want to send someone to the Fediverse. Love the starter packs option!
I’ve thought of adding a “random mode”, and at least one other person also suggested this.
I was a bit hesitant at first, but let me look into how this could work. I’ll need to find a good, maintained list to pull from. I don’t personally have the bandwidth to manage something like this.
That’s totally fair, and sifting through them is a whole job in itself. If it helps, the way I would do this would be via Javascript, where I would just pick a handful of generic servers and stick them into an array that gets randomly pulled from on page load. Having only a few (five or six) to pull from would give some small variety, but wouldn’t require you to maintain a db of instances that are currently accepting members, etc. etc.