Randomise servers shown when no filters chosen

[lazyatom]

When "all regions" and "all topics" are selected (i.e. the default) on https://joinmastodon.org/servers, the order that instances are presented is essentially fixed.

This means that the first server shown is likely to be the one selected by many people looking to join a Mastodon server; particularly when the potential user is unfamiliar with the federated nature of Mastodon, and if the person has not read any of the details that the server tries to present about the community it is hoping to serve. This can result in a disproportionate moderation load for that server.

This load is the only reason why I requested my instance be temporarily de-listed -- we got many hundreds of registration requests and it became too much to process.

I hope to be a good citizen of the Fediverse, and not just shift that moderation issue to the next server down the list, so -- perhaps if the set of servers shown was shuffled, at the very least when the list is unfiltered, although potentially even within the filtered sets, that would more fairly spread the moderation load across all the servers listed.

This shuffling could be done at the API level (I'm not sure where the canonical data store is -- I know it used to be instances.social, but I'm not sure if it still is), or by this server.

[danielfilho]

I believe there's an intelligence already in place as I could see here, based on last week's adoption.

If not, I'm happy to help implementing this on my free time :)

[lazyatom]

Unfortunately that sort will only change as frequently as the values of last_week_users changes (which, implied by the name, is once a week). In the event of another migration, that's not fast enough to evenly distribute the load of new users across multiple servers.

Thanks for your offer to help implement!