Speaking of first time user experience, there is probably a lot of room for improvement for the "onboarding" screen. It's kinda out of everybody's mind because you only see it once ever.

I get to see it more during development, and it doesn't look great.

The fact that we don't do any tracking or analytics complicates matters. It's really hard to tell whether a change actually has any positive effect. I literally don't have any data to tell me whether after we added the onboarding modal more new users stayed or not.
I should be happy with just getting 1.6 out there but instead I am wrecking myself thinking about optimizing first user experience
@Gargron
Have you considered “guerilla UX testing”? Like going to a coffeshop and buying someone coffee in exchange of looking at them use Mastodon for five minutes?
http://www.uxbooth.com/articles/the-art-of-guerrilla-usability-testing/
The Art of Guerrilla Usability Testing | UX Booth

How can we go about testing our designs with minimum effort? David Simon explores guerrilla usability testing: the art of quickly soliciting – and later analyzing – user feedback.

UX Booth