Today we’re making signing up on Mastodon easier than ever before. We understand that deciding which Mastodon service provider to kick off your experience with can be confusing. We know this is a completely new concept for many people, since traditionally the platform and the service provider are one and the same. This choice is what makes Mastodon different from existing social networks, but it also presents a unique onboarding challenge.
I personally don’t really care for this change, but it would have been nice - although I understand it would have taken significant time/effort to develop that could be used in other areas with the limited resources - if there was some criteria to create a selection of instances that would be randomly selected based on something like:
Not sure what else they could track, but those three would be a good start, though admittedly a lot of additional work.