@cathal @kro This is why I try to encourage everyone to talk to their local hackerspace to start a local, democratically organised instance which can be regulated by face to face meetings and general consensus :)

Most of the larger, public nodes are run by people who essentially just want to have places where they can invite their friends to join the network but also leave the doors open for others to join as well. Since that builds on the assumption that you have an idea of whom you're inviting (and can take a couple of minutes to describe the confusing federation parts in person) - just getting a random rush of thousands of people will undoubtedly be confusing for most of the stampeding herd of newcomers.

I'm sure we can do better, but I have no problem with just managing to catch on to the few of the herd that don't run amok and leave after a day. And then do the actual outreach one by one, through friendship and directed, thought through invitations.