You should always direct people to a landing page where they can choose from or be directed to multiple different instances.
https://kbin.pub/en or https://kbin.fediverse.observer/list
https://join-lemmy.org/ or https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
You can direct people away from specific instances if, for example, they have been de-federated.
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.
Absolutely agree. I totally get the idea of federated content and letting people make their own decisions, but the higher the barrier of entry, the less mainstream the fediverse will be. Especially right now, people are going to want an easy replacement for reddit, not learn a fundamentally new system that is still in the early adoption phase by tech people.