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
With the current amount of users on Lemmy I think language specific content is still too niche and it should be nothing more than an option. The extra click certainly isn't worth it. People can always sign up for a language specific Lemmy instance later on if they so wish. They just need to get in, and get in fast with minimal friction.
Extra clicks are not a big deal. You go through the wizard once. Extra cognitive load is the problem, and it's abstracted as clicks or steps. But anyone who sees a language selector understands what is being asked of them and which language they need to pick.
Extra clicks are a huge deal. There's a reason platforms like Amazon are so focussed on minimizing the amount of clicks users have to go through to from webpage to payment.
Getting a Lemmy users to finish their registration in this case is similar to "getting a transaction done". Language selectors are a massive list of languages and a big hindrance.
Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux