I can’t comment with authority as I dont go there any more, but wouldn’t part of the reason be that many of the quality posters have left and its more spambots and karma farmers and worse mods than before? You can’t enshittify a platform and not expect it to get Whittier for users.
I’m surprised peopke are moving to x. Even public facing tweets from company’s that use x are blocked behind a log in.
The domain for my email is gmail.com not Aussie zone. I also cannot log in to gmail on the hotmail (outlook? )site. Perhaps you are interpreting their request to not use username and site name and instead use email, to instead use a long form Lemmy username?
That could work, but I don’t know that it adds any extra layer of simplicity, but maybe that’s what they meant. My interpretation is that they are saying to link your account to your email address, as that’s what most other services do. Without knowing which instance you register with, there would need to be a registry. Perhaps this could be hashed in some way, but it would still be effectively public facing as any instance would need access.
To do so, there would need to be a centralized or federated list of all accounts. If it was centralized it would be against federation principles. If it was federated, then anyone who sets up a server would potentially have access to all email addresses. Perhaps,more in the style of email, like @user but that would likely lead to more confusion as people would put their email and it is essentially the same information.
I do agree that log in as the opening page is not a great experience. Helping people to find an instance should be easier to filter. Rather than a list by popularity, let them know choosing by interest or location can help find relevant content and have easy to use clickable filters to do so.