My thoughts exactly. Growth is a byproduct of quality. Similarly, if the Fediverse grows too much and quality starts to slip, we should also let it shrink until quality comes back. I think our aim should be quality, and anything else is just a side effect.

Building a signup wizard to use that information to select a instance would seem to be the best approach.

That’s actually not a bad idea. I’m not on board with mining contacts, but I think there’s a simple, transparent way to do this that can actually be fun: a personality quiz. Sure, if someone knows what instance to join already, they can override this. But if they don’t, they get like five questions, and then they are matched to an instance.