I strongly disagree with you. By encouraging a single site, rather than some nebulous part of a community, you take a lot of the decision and strife away, and help to bring new people to your "local" community. Trying to navigate the fediverse as a whole doesn't interest me or a lot of people. Most people online do want monolithic platforms - see the move from IRC servers to ICQ/AIM/MSN/Y!Msgr, then the consolidation on AIM, and now Discord. The same goes with social media. Independent blogs and webrings led to myspace and facebook (and then just Facebook), independent food reviews led to Yelp, independent stores led to ebay & amazon. Forums led to Digg, Digg v4 was the rise of Reddit. People want to centralize into a community.

In spite of how it's sold, the Fediverse doesn't feel like a single community. It feels like a bunch of small towns meeting at the county fair. That's the only way I can describe it. I don't want to read stuff that's happening over there, I want to have stuff happening here. And that's before we get into defederated communities.

I get what you're saying, but I just can't agree. Putting a decision early in the onboarding process when they don't have the context to make an informed decision, it adds a lot of friction. If you are referring friends or members of a community, refer an instance you believe in. If they find out later it doesn't work for them, they can always move. Personally I found choosing an instance upfront put me off from joining lemmy for weeks. And ultimately it wasn't a very important decision in the long run as nothing is guaranteed and you can always move.

I hear what you're saying, but the reason it took me until the reddit blackout to join lemmy, even though I'd heard of it right after the API pricing was announced, was because I was paralyzed by choice and FOMO. What if I join an instance that gets defederated, or defederates, from something I enjoy? I have to either make a separate account over there or never see that content. Look at what just happened with Beehaw. If I'd stayed on lemmy.world (the first instance I joined), I'd be shit out of luck because half of what I'm subscribed to is Beehaw. The instance I'm on now has (so far) not defederated ANYTHING, which for me is a good thing, since it leaves my options completely open, regardless of whether I intend to use those options or not. It still doesn't protect my instance from BEING defederated, but there's nothing I can do about that. That type of uncertainty and FOMO needs to be addressed if the fediverse is going to continue to expand.