There should be a kind of “sorting hat” personality test to attract the interest of prospective Lemmy joiners. People who love solarpunk stuff, for example, would easily find their home in slrpnk.net. Set a link to it on sites like join-lemmy.org to make the fediverse more approachable to casuals.
Unfortunately, that seems to be about local communities, which aren’t really important. In fact, due to federation, that’s the least important aspect of an instance.
By default, Lemmy is wide open to anything and everything. You need to see what they have turned off/blocked/removed, to see if it’s what you want.
Yeah I see your point. How easy would it be to sort a thousand instances automatically? Sure you could limit to the top instances, but smaller ones can be niche and I think you still need a way to recommend them. New instances also need a way to work their way up to being recommended.
A sorting hat would be cool but sounds like a lot of manual work!