@feditips On the other hand, statements from someone that I respect, who spent a long time on twitter but finally joined us here, have said, after having spent many months here, that they still believe that the onboarding problem is real.

Don't take me wrong, I agree with you on everything you said. I'd rather see less people join the Fediverse than seeing more centralisation around m.s. But if the goal is to bring more people in, something like this needs to be done.

Perhaps an option would be for instances to make their own application (which would just be one of the common applications, but branded to their instance).

That way, if you wanted to join mstdn.social, you just download the mstdn.social application.

A lot of people these days don't know the difference between an application and a website anyway, so this may actually be more in line with expectations.