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
Ok so I think it would be best to have two ways: One really completely foolproof way, where the user does not need to know a single thing about the technologies involved. 0 upfront homework for the user.
And then a second way for users willing to take the time to do a 'manual setup'.
I created an AI slop clickable mockup real quick as it's easier to bring the idea across than describing it with lots of words. This only covers the foolproof way.
https://jsfiddle.net/da9m4nuq/
The main idea being to remove all possible friction for users who are the opposite of tech savvy - which imo are the absolute majority of all users.
The tricky part is preselecting a server for them. This will probably need a more or less manually curated list of servers which most people will be okay with - so no extreme opinions, not technical, big enough so they don't seem empty on first sight. Done in such a way that the people get more or less equally distributed, so we don't create one centralized instance.
But I think it is crucial to remove any friction for the users. Don't let them do homework before they even know what Lemmy is and if it's worth it at all.
Makes sense, this is similar to the changes I drafted in #524. In another comment we also talked about a list of manually curated default instances and I selected a few.