Mastodon

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:

1. instance age - Your instance must be active for N months/(years?) to qualify to ensure rando spawns that may die a week later don't impact users, as well as being able to track the next rule:
2. instance reliability - If there is a way to track this, only include instances that meet a specific number and maintained it for the last N months. It would suck to throw users into an unreliable instance, or one that started off great but started going south in the last 3 months.
3. same server rules and privacy policy - To ensure a "family friendly" set of default instances that people could easily join without having to overthink it.

Not sure what else they could track, but those three would be a good start, though admittedly a lot of additional work.

Seems like it is only new users that sign up on JoinMastodon. Seems you can go to any of the servers QOTO, C.IM, Fosstodon, Infosec., etc. and still sign up directly.