this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2026
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Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.

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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:

Edit: Here is a draft for some changes to the frontpage: https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/pull/524

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[–] Aria@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

if you have any specific suggestions for better images I would be happy to replace them.

Okay. I will give this some thought.

(tags) dont exist in Lemmy itself, and the ones defined on joinlemmy are practically unmaintained.

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.

For a normal user it shouldnt be necessary to understand federation before signing up.

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 of linked/blocked instances

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.

Is there any other information you would like

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.

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 1 points 23 hours ago

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.

Sure, and they can also update it on their own by making a PR to this file. In fact anyone can do that.

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.

Very good question. I suppose the main criteria are:

  • Topic (general purpose or specific interest)
  • Language or country
  • Instance size (small, medium, large)

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.

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