Maybe if instances were called "communities," and there was a better way to figure out which community was right for you, we could provide a better experience to new users.
I feel like the "find an instance" thing is in the process of getting solved, but I signed up on unixcorn.xyz because I thought the URL was cool. I didn't realize unixcorn is a French Open Source community until afterwards.
The whole about -> about/more thing is not intuitive. I don't know if 1.2 affects that. Haven't tried