Yeah I don’t think the multi-select listboxes have really changed much since the days of Internet Explorer 3 and Netscape Navigator. Out of all the standard form components you can use in HTML, it’s probably the one most in need of improvements.

I’ve used software where you have to ctrl click but I’m not sure I’ve ever come across another website where this is the case

This is the standard behaviour on the web for lists where you can select multiple options. See the example here for instance: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/select#advanced_select_with_multiple_features

Most sites have a custom version though, since the built-in HTML element has such a poor user experience. I really wish browsers would just switch it to be a list with checkboxes.

The behaviour was based on Windows desktop apps in the 90s (where this behaviour was way more common), but after a while, most things switched to checkbox lists instead.

Realistically the solution would be instances moving away from the Lemmy ‘brand’

This is a great idea, and I think some instances do this. I seem to remember Beehaw taking this approach. Similar to forums - each forum has a different name even if they use the same software.

The tricky part for regular users to understand is that if they sign up on one server, they can still access content on others. Old-school internet users thay used to use Usenet would understand it (Usenet functioned the same way) but the majority of users are used to centralized services these days, which makes it hard.

My only thought here is the words like federation and instances getting people hung up. Maybe join-lemmy.org being a highly ranked site is doing more harm than good by creating an additional barrier to the instances and content.

The thing is, that’s a fundamental feature of Lemmy. It’s designed such that no one person or company controls the whole thing. Admins that have differing opinions can each have their own servers with whatever rules they want.

That makes it somewhat incompatible with a a basic signup page like what you’re proposing, just like you can’t have a generic “sign up for email” page without picking a specific provider. Having a huge number of users on a single server somewhat defeats the purpose of decentralization - you’re back to a small number of people / a company having control over a major part of the ecosystem.

Perhaps it could redirect people to a randomly selected instance from a hand-picked list, but maybe that’d be even more confusing? I’m not sure.