From Hannah Aubury at Mastodon:

For now, we want to run some onboarding experiments to test our ideas and learn what can work for us and for everyone on the network. Our first experiment is Default Server Recommendations. (If you were at FOSDEM or following along at home, you may have seen Andy Piper and I announce this or post about it!). Practically, we will replace the “join mastodon.social” button with a button that recommends a server from an opt-in pool that we will be hand selecting to start.

Good to see.

The email analogy (“choosing a server is like choosing an email provider”) has always been a solid go-to explanation, and it works reasonably well if you already understand why you might want your own email domain. That works great for a certain kind of person and lands with a thud for everyone else. Federation is genuinely a foreign concept for most new users, and no amount of clever copy fixes that. The real question is whether Mastodon can make the choice feel low-stakes enough that people stop worrying about it entirely and just … join somewhere.

This experiment feels like a step in that direction. Hope it fuels additional growth.