Thanks for the effort behind this. Aside from friends joining in groups I think the way some of the onboarders go about inviting many in one go may be a reason to the better retention rates, but of course also having a simpler way to nominate these users for curation and us being more certain of their legitimacy compared to new users joining we curate with other projects such as lovesniper where there may be foul play going on for easy intro post rewards at times. They often hold seminars either online through voice and cam with potential new users or host irl events where they showcase hive and give out invite codes to interested people. This of course is a "better of both worlds" as many in a certain area may already know the other participating parties wanting to join so they can stick together on their journey here and it also improves engagement on their posts and at the same time retention.
I really think it'd be worth to try and give this a chance to scale with some additional funding beside the small beneficiary rewards as there's a lot of work that goes into onboarding and guiding people either directly or through seminars and events.
PS. One thing that's been hindring some of our onboarding lately has been hiveonboard dev being afk and it causing certain countries being blocked by IP and requiring a VPN for invite links to work, which of course is not something we can ask of both onboarders and onboardees to use when all they want is to create a hive account. We'll be looking into creating or making use of other account creation services that can fill our needs in the near future.