In one aspect, the Mastodon migration reminds me of the real refugee crisis we had in Europe beginning with 2015. Part of being able to deal with the influx without denying people entry were efforts to fairly distribute refugees between the different european countries.<p>Could Mastodon/the Fediverse benefit from a similar "distribution service"?<p>On the one hand, you have crowds of ex-Twitter users who are willing to switch, but have no idea what an instance is - or at least have no deep knowledge of existing instances and no particular preference for one.<p>On the other hand, large instances like mastodon.social are (at the risk of) being overrun, because most people will try to make an account there - again, most probably not because they specifically want to be on that instance, but because it's the most "established" one, the one where most of their peers are and the one that does not require any specific qualifications to sign up.<p>So maybe this problem could be solved by making a service that allows people with a Twitter account to sign-up on Mastodon - <i>and will also pick the instance for them</i>.<p>Instances could register with that service and specify a contingent of new users they are willing to accept (and possibly more restrictions if they want). If a user wants to sign up, the service will randomly pick an instance for them, in such a way that new users are evenly distributed between instances and no instance gets more than their announced quota of new users.