[jszymborski]

I've definitely thought about this.

Or even doing like a pottermore/buzzfeed-style quiz to "sort" you into an instance.

Honestly, I think the people that would bristle most about this are the instances themselves. I imagine that the vast majority of them dread the idea of having an influx of people who are joining the instance with little thought as to the existing community.

Some are probably more amenable to this, but those are likely to be the large general instances like mastodon.social and mas.to, but they are already huge.

[xg15]

> Honestly, I think the people that would bristle most about this are the instances themselves.

Yeah, I can imagine that - which is why the instances would have to be in control here. E.g., require that an instance explicitly registers with the service before you start assigning users to them. Also that's why I think it's important that instances announce how many new users there are willing to take.

Of course, this could lead to new problems, e.g. the service could be a target for malicious instances: Make an instance, stuff it full of (your own) bots that promote some sort of MLM or crypto scam, then have the entrypoint service supply you with a steady stream of gullible users.

Or alternatively, use the service to quickly grow large, then sell data from your users, employ accounts from your instance as spambots, etc.

So such an entrypoint would somehow have to balance the interests of the users and the interests of the instances.