After going through the invite process I think it may be good to get new users into a “/b/random” channel so they can socialise straight away.
My thoughts are this could be configured as a default channel or a per invite basis as extension to the invite code.
A lot of people are new to XMPP it will allow them to see that other users do exist without manually adding people at the start.
Quick update on this: we recently introduced default channel bookmarks for new accounts, meaning that you can see those channels in a list in most clients in the join-channel dialog somewhere.
Auto-joining would be a bit of a privacy issue, so that’s turned off at the moment.
Those are my thoughts exactly. If you could add channel invites directly to the account invitation, then there’s less of a privacy issue, since nobody knows which channel automatically has new users added (in case the chat client auto-joins on invitation that is).
Also, I think it makes more sense to have the user be invited to channels with the context of their group/inviter, instead of one big channel for everyone.