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[Help Design Lemmy] Joinlemmy website and New User Onboarding (lemmy.ml)
submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by nutomic@lemmy.ml to c/lemmy@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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[-] otter@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 weeks ago

I just took another look at the site, and I love the new changes already!

Very good idea, also opened an issue: https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/issues/526

I see the developer also found the issue, great to hear that you both might be collaborating.

The images are just to avoid having too much text, a bit similar to the Peertube site. I already mentioned it in another comment, if you know any better images to put there I would be happy to replace them. The icons on your site are very small, so it would still show a lot of text.

That's a good point. I like the images you have currently, and I'll keep an eye out for anything that might be better.

True these havent been updated in a long time. Any specific features that you would emphasize?

A few of them have nice big cards now, so those could be combined. Otherwise the features that I personally would have been interested in are (in no particular order):

  • Emojis with autocomplete support. Start typing :
  • User tagging using @, Community tagging using !: You could also emphasize that this works across instances. For example: "Tagging users and communities from any federated instance"
  • Integrated image uploading in both posts and comments.
  • i18n / internationalization support for > 30 languages
  • RSS / Atom feeds for All, Subscribed, Inbox, User, and Community.
  • By hosting your own server, you can be in full control of your content.

Instances can have multiple topics, in fact you can make a PR to this file to update it yourself.

Thanks, I made a note for our team to look into that in the future!

I like Pixelfed’s join page since I can quickly narrow down an instance based on what’s important to me: https://pixelfed.org/servers

That's a good point, I'm also not sure if there is a good way for instance admins to change that on Pixelfed's site. I don't have a strong preference either way, but having some way for admins to update the information would be ideal. Perhaps an automated system with custom overrides through a file on the GitHub?

Some more feedback on the current version of the site:

  • It might be good to indicate that the instance in the first card is a random instance, and not an official or 'flagship' instance. That way, if it links to a poorly moderated / maintained instance, it doesn't reflect poorly on the project. My personal preference would be to have the Browse All Servers be the primary button, and then the join button be secondary. A refresh button might also work: "Refresh for a new randomly selected server"
  • Very minor, but some of the images are light mode while others are dark mode. It might look better if it was consistent
[-] nutomic@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago

That’s a good point, I’m also not sure if there is a good way for instance admins to change that on Pixelfed’s site. I don’t have a strong preference either way, but having some way for admins to update the information would be ideal. Perhaps an automated system with custom overrides through a file on the GitHub?

Not sure how you mean. Is it too complicated to make a pull request and edit the file I linked above?

It might be good to indicate that the instance in the first card is a random instance, and not an official or ‘flagship’ instance. That way, if it links to a poorly moderated / maintained instance, it doesn’t reflect poorly on the project. My personal preference would be to have the Browse All Servers be the primary button, and then the join button be secondary. A refresh button might also work: “Refresh for a new randomly selected server”

Its not random from the whole list, but selected from a curated list (currently only lemmus.org and thelemmy.club, see #545). Its displayed like this because a lot of people complained that choosing an instance is too complicated.

Very minor, but some of the images are light mode while others are dark mode. It might look better if it was consistent

The images are not great, I will make a similar post soon to get contributions, and feedback for better texts.

[-] otter@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Not sure how you mean. Is it too complicated to make a pull request and edit the file I linked above?

Not at all, I accidentally quoted the wrong text in my reply. I meant to reply to this bit: "Most instances are uncategorized, and country selection is by server IP so Germany also has pixelshot.it listed. Manually specifying countries would be more reliable (but also more effort)".

I was proposing having an automated system that uses the server IP (or another method), and then overriding it with any manually entered information from that file. That could be paired with an extra visual indicator or filter method to differentiate between the two.

Its not random from the whole list, but selected from a curated list (currently only lemmus.org and thelemmy.club, see #545). Its displayed like this because a lot of people complained that choosing an instance is too complicated.

That's fair. Maybe you could add a line above those buttons saying something like "We have picked a random instance for you to try:"

That might be enough for the user to understand that the highlighted instance is not official / run by your team.

The images are not great, I will make a similar post soon to get contributions, and feedback for better texts.

Sounds great, looking forward to it!

[-] nutomic@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 days ago

We already have server location based on the IP shown on join-lemmy.org, and this can also be used for filtering. There are a few ideas to improve it further, most importantly Regional Instances for Quick Join.

[-] otter@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 days ago

Regional Instances for Quick Join sounds cool, looking forward to it :)

this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2026
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