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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:
- 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
I haven’t looked at that site in a few years.
One thing I always think about though, in order to get a better distribution of users across instances, maybe not put the biggest instances at the top (like Lemmy.world) but instead put active medium to large size instances at the very top. But not that they are too small or too inactive such that user signs up on an instance which is not properly maintained or used, giving them a bad experience and possibly losing their instance/account.
And maybe offer different levels of option selection for any type of sign up wizard. Like advanced options could let you specify a bunch of stuff. But maybe have a simple option, like googles old “I’m feeling lucky” button. But you might call it “Pick an active instance for me” or something like that. Which might again use the above sizing and activity guidelines to pick an instance for them.
Lemmy.world is already excluded from the list as it has more than 30% of active users. And the list now uses a "biased random" sorting by default, with larger instances always near the top, and smaller instances further down.
Are there any specific options you would like to see? I did just add an icon to indicate instances which require email verification (#523), but also dont want to overload the UI with too much info. And I made some changes to the homepage, including a button to open a random instance (#524).