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
Ask the user if they want to give Hitler a medal or a bullet. Medal redirects to .world and bullet to grad.👍 (This is a joke).
I think the colour scheme and dark-mode screenshots contributes to it looking daunting. You even have Matrix (the film)-text in the open source banner photo. The website looks like it's trying to sell the Lemmy software instead of the Lemmy user experience/community. I think just changing those photos to gentler more iconographic or symbolic ones would go a long way towards making it lighter to process. In fact in-fact, those concepts don't really need pictures to make them easier to communicate, but the features list probably does. There's a paste-icon and then it says "Clean, mobile-friendly interface.". I think just having a mobile screenshot would communicate that way better.
As for helping the user find an instance: If you can find a concise way to communicate what federation is, that'll probably take some of the anxiety away. I don't really know how. What do people think about maybe showing like a "80% federated" type stat? Tags would also help, because right now you're basically going by the logo and name, and only when one catches your eye do you read the description. (You might immediately read the description of the first few presented). I think users probably want to compare by seeing structured information so the differences stand out. Since the description is free form it's not 1-to-1 like tags would be. The current presentations makes user count seem by far the most important. And then once you've made that assumption you'll probably make another assumption that user count determines how much content you can interact with.
We dont have any designers on the team so these things are always tricky for us. The images are quite arbitrary, so if you have any specific suggestions for better images I would be happy to replace them.
For a normal user it shouldnt be necessary to understand federation before signing up. Tags are tricky because they are dont exist in Lemmy itself, and the ones defined on joinlemmy are practically unmaintained.
I see what you mean about user count, the current layout makes it seem like the most important metric to compare instances, when in reality it doesnt matter so much. Plus the tooltips are wrong, these are only numbers for local users and local comments, federated ones are not counted (and unfortunately are not available from the API at the moment). Is there any other information you would like to see instead of these numbers? The ones I see which are relevant and easily available would be:
Okay. I will give this some thought.
It's unmaintained but at least it exists. I'm sure you'd go through the effort of updating them if an instance owner asked, right? So they're probably still close enough. You do have data to present and it's better than nothing.
But then what decision are they making? Both what decision are they actually making and what decision do they think they're making? Knowing that they can interact with all* the instances is hugely transformative to your heuristics.
Number linked is good, but blocked has the problem of confusing narrow scope and being vigilant against spam. An instance might federate with everyone* but because it's more maintained they also block more.
Cloudflare is useful to know for our privacy-consonous userbase. It might be kinda technical but if there is one or two stats visible the user cares about or at least understands then I don't think having one they don't understand matters. They essentially don't understand "users" and that's the main thing presented right now.
Sure, and they can also update it on their own by making a PR to this file. In fact anyone can do that.
Very good question. I suppose the main criteria are:
This is a niche topic again, most normal users dont even know what Cloudflare is. Those who care can choose an instance which mentions privacy, or check it themselves.
Opened an issue here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/issues/525