This is an unreleased feature to federate some popular communities when a new Lemmy instance is created. It was hardcoded to lemmy.ml for a while, but I already changed this and made it configurable. Obviously the entire development code for Lemmy is not ready for production now, and needs a lot of fine-tuning. Its not an argument against the stable release version of Lemmy.
Its intentionally in this order because Mastodon prioritizes the last item (ie the community). If the order was changed, it would be impossible for Mastodon users to interact with a community where a user with the same name exists.
Yes I agree, others have mentioned the same thing. The purpose of this post is to gather concrete suggestions, so please edit your comment with a sentence that you would use instead.
Right now it feels like the website is geared towards the style and content that technical users appreciate. I agree with the other comments that it would be nice to simplify the website down. Technical users are willing to explore for more information while the average user taking a quick look will likely leave.
Taking inspiration from other Fediverse platforms, my favourite landing pages are from Peertube and Mastodon:
Makes sense, this all seems similar to the frontpage changes I drafted today (added screenshot to the OP just now).
This is likely a biased opinion, but could you add ‘region’ as a field, or ‘regional’ as a topic? For our instance, I think that’s how a lot of people are choosing to make an account with us given recent events. It also helps the user find an instance that is nearby (for lower latency), and within a jurisdiction that they are familiar with / can have an influence over through voting or other means. pangora.social seems to be down right now, but I recall them having a nice way of organizing that
Another biased opinion, I agree that it’s better to have large instances near the top since they’re more likely to be up / fixed quickly / on top of moderation. You could include a note saying that larger instances are near the top because of XYZ, and that people can always make more accounts down the road if you change your mind. That way there’s less pressure to pick the “correct” instance.
This is already the case since yesterday, there is a semirandom sort which always shows larger instances near the top and smaller ones further down.
Could you potentially collaborate with https://lemmyapps.com/ ? It would be easier for users to submit updates to one place (whether it is a PR to you or an update on that site)
Could you make the logo have a rectangular / circle background around it? Right now edges look odd over the dark background. The hover effect looks nicer, maybe with different colors
You mean the Lemmy logo in the top left? It seems the thin lines are not rendered well at this small scale. What colors would you use?
In the header: News, Docs, & Contact can be collapsed into a dropdown under ‘About’ or something similar, since those are pages that someone would go searching for
Maybe, but there are so few items that it seems fine like this.
Instead of ‘Join a server’, ‘Donate’ and ‘See all servers’, it might be better to have one massive “Join a Server” button/card on the front page that leads to the instance list page.
The paragraph is a large block of text. I’d prefer something closer to what Peertube did
With Peertube they have a good designer on board to make these graphics. We are all programmers, so its very difficult to make a good design without more concrete suggestions.
The images give off ‘AI generated’ vibes, even if that wasn’t their origin. Could you have large cards with simple icons, similar to the 3 header cards on our site: https://fedecan.ca/en/
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.
I like the ‘Create your own discussion platform’ card’s format. It’s a bit hard to read, but otherwise nice
The ‘more features’ section could be simplified down to the important points, and maybe even combined with what is being done with the screenshots area
True these havent been updated in a long time. Any specific features that you would emphasize?
Is every instance under one topic, or would it be possible to let the user select multiple and have instances appear and disappear from the list live?
Instances can have multiple topics, in fact you can make a PR to this file to update it yourself.
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 does look good, though it also has some problems. 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).
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.
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.
Then it would be one of the monthly tasks for @dessalines@lemmy.ml and me to go through this list and keep it updated.
The new front page looks much better and cleaner. Not sure about the “Apps” though, people need to create an account first so.
At least some of the apps let you register directly, though I dont have an overview of that. Would be good to contact the app devs about adding a registration option where it is missing. They might have the same doubts which instances to use as defaults.
Also I’d call it “Mobile Apps” instead, “Apps” is a bit vague.
It also includes web apps and desktop apps...
I still plead for removing both buttons and directly showing the “instance selector” in the middle area, with the “See all instances” showing in the top bar only. Maybe slightly more prominently than the other top bar icons
Which instance selector do you mean?
The definition used by Reddit currently is also possible
"News aggregator" and "Link aggregator" is very similar, either one works for me.
One of the buttons talks about “instances” and the other one about “servers in your new design”. Not sure what the difference there is
No difference, its just that "Instances" may not be clear to new users. Should definitely be made consistent before merging.
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:
Yes, theres an open issue for this: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/6154