There is perennial discussion about what fediverse servers (Lemmy or otherwise) to recommend to new users. I have a proposal, perhaps not very original but I haven’t seen it made often.
Let’s just recommend that newbies pick an instance that is located close to them geographically. That’s to say: their country, their region, or (ideally) their town.
Some context. Personally, I am not totally sold on social media, federated or otherwise. The evidence is now pretty clear that it causes major social harms. One way it does this is by fuelling polarization around hot-button national and international debates, at the expense of local issues. Reviving democracy is going to mean boosting communities at a local level. This could be a small way to do that.
So the recommended unit can be the nearest server with any critical mass. If you’re in Greece you get pushed to whatever’s the leading
.grserver. Ultimately it doesn’t matter much since we can all interact with everything via federation. My point is that this might responsibilize users more, and encourage communities to overlap with the offline world a bit more - a place where community is very much needed right now.But then you have the question of what do you define as critical mass and which specialized instances to exclude.
Don’t get me wrong, I support your idea and I generally think an instance should always be pre-selected for a new user (with an option to pick your own). Some of it should definitely be based on geo/regional factors.