When people are told about Lemmy and look for it in a search engine, join-lemmy.org is one of the first pages that comes up. Here they should be able to find out what Lemmy is, and be able to register an account to start posting.
At the moment this still seems too complicated, so I'm looking for your suggestions to improve it:
- On the main page, is the text relevant and up to date or should anything be changed?
- How about the instance selection wizard (click "join a server" on the homepage), which lets you select topics and languages to select instances. Do the current options make sense?
- The instance list itself, is there any information missing, or potential design improvements?
- And the list of apps, what can be done here? For one thing the data is rarely updated, so we would appreciate pull requests.
- Any other suggestions you may have.
Since yesterday I already made a couple of improvements:
- Use biased random for instance list, so large instances are always near the top
- Rename Join to Sign Up in instance list
- Fix icon overflows by using inline-flex (by @dessalines)
- Add button to visit random instance (not merged yet)
Edit: Here is a draft for some changes to the frontpage:
https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/pull/524
Because I've not looked at it since I signed up 2.5y ago, just went through to see how many clicks to get to a sign up page.
5 clicks is maybe slightly on the "too many" side. Perhaps language selection could be auto selected by browser language and/or default to multi.
Though randomness highlighted a 2nd issue that might not be especially visible. I got Lemmy.zip as my top suggestion so I hit the sign up button and I was greeted by a "blocked in my country because my government are idiots" page. Now I understand why the admins have made that choice, but for a new user who stumbles onto Lemmy by accident, does the 5 clicks and gets greeted by a user journey terminating error page, it's probably going to result in a fair amount of bounce.
Now I know it can't be perfect given instances don't declare by API where they are available, so I guess it would need to be a manually curated list, but maybe a feature to push instances down the list if they're geoblocked in the user's IP country
Makes sense, I opened an issue for automatic language selection: https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/issues/519
The 5 clicks is with the selection dialog, if you click "See all servers" instead (or the "Join" button in the top menu), you get to the instance list directly and can be done with 2 clicks. What do you think about renaming the button "Join a server" to "Instance selection wizard" or similar?
The country blocks are tricky, to know about this we would have to add data for
allowed_countriesorblocked_countriesfor each instance (and keep it up to date). I guess you are in the UK?How did you guess..! haha
I imagine we're one of the main demographics affected by this in terms of Lemmy traffic share, but I'm sure there must be other countries that face similar blocks
Yeah I had a bit of a think to try and come up with a practical solution that was less of a manual exercise, but I couldn't think of anything simple. The other solution I came up with is much more involved, where Lemmy offers geoblocking as a built-in feature to allow the instances to self-report their geoblocking config in a consistent way.
If it's too impractical/too much of a maintenance burden to solve, we will probably have to live with it, but I wanted to raise it for visibility regardless.
So from a UX point of view, I went for the most obvious CTA to get me started from my perspective.
Just had a look again and the quick join is behind the hamburger menu on mobile, so I'd say add a CTA for that of equal prominence next to the wizard CTA.
I'm not a copy guy so I'm not sure what's the best wording to use to make the two options distinct. It needs to offer the "sign me up quick" Vs "I want to customise my choice" user journeys clearly
Brainstorming, perhaps the "just sign me up" button could even take you straight to the sign up page of the random top instance in the list. Perhaps with a self-redirecting interstitial page to let them know where they're going if that's not super old-school
Another semi-related issue, perhaps you want to consider down-weighting nsfw instances in the list too, as I'd guess the average user would probably not otherwise choose one of those as their home instance.
It seems that Australia introduced some similar laws recently, and we can expect other western countries to follow their example over the next years. These could be handled by builtint geoblocking in Lemmy, but I'm not sure if it would really be flexible enough.
Then there is also the case of countries blocking certain websites/instances via DNS, for example China. This is not so noticable now because we have few users from such countries, but it may also get more relevant as Lemmy grows. And this is not something which can be specified on the instance itself.
The cleanest solution would be to run a service in various countries which pings the different Lemmy instances to see if they are reachable. But that would be complex to setup, and expensive to host (unless we rely on volunteers, which makes it even more complex to manage).
You can also quick join with the third button "See all servers". Again the button texts are maybe not clear enough. It could make sense to add a button "Visit random instance" directly on the homepage, similar to #513. Not sure if that should go to registration or to the instance homepage, as the user may want to have a look around first.
@geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml also made some similar suggestions in a sibling comment.
NSFW instances are already excluded from the list.
I thought about the ping-instances-from-different-regions, but figured it would be impractical to do this for every country, and would potentially end up hitting false positives/negatives around bot detection tooling such as the cloudflare captcha screen with some instances.
Definitely not a simple one to solve!
You may have a regression in prod then, I added that point to my comment because I got lemmynsfw at the top of the list on one of my refreshes somehow
I must have remembered that wrong about filtering NSFW, because now I cant find that filter anywhere. But seeing as there is only one NSFW instance in the list and its clearly labeled as such, it seems fine like this.
Fair play, I was more coming from a place of you maybe wanting to do something about that if you're gonna have a button that sends people to a random instance.
I should have said at the start btw, thanks for all the work you guys do
Ah that makes sense, made a note to change that.
No worries, thanks for the helpful feedback!