Lemmy Lead Developer and father of two children.
I also develop Ibis, a federated wiki.
I must have remembered that wrong about filtering NSFW, because now I cant find that filter anywhere. But seeing as there is only one NSFW instance in the list and its clearly labeled as such, it seems fine like this.
The term Link Aggregator has got to go. Call it a forum and call it a day
Its not the same, as forums dont use scores and have less focus on external links. The text already mentions forums, by removing link aggregator it would also be too short here.
See all servers button at the top as well
That is what "Join" does, but the text is probably not clear. "See all servers" is a bit long, would "Instances" be clear enough?
There needs to be more “general” servers. Lemmy.world was the most popular choice because people want to check out Lemmy and just click on “general”. Not sure if .ml still has the commie paste prompt.
There are a few like lemmy.zip, lemmy.wtf or reddthat. We could also consider showing lemmy.world again, but with the current sorting it is always shown at the top because it is so much larger than other instances. lemmy.ml still has the commie paste prompt.
If possible let their first server be a general one without email verification so they can quickly join
From what I can see, all the general instances do require email verification.
Images of Lemmy at the bottom are a bit confusing maybe? undecided on that
You mean those grayscale images by the features? Those are just general placeholders to avoid having all text. There arent really any images which are relevant to show for a software project.
Maybe that can be added as a filter. For now I added an icon to instances which require email to signup (#523).
Language customization should be less emphasized, or should be put in the “interests” section based on their country IP while joining. On the internet imperialist English has been considered the default language. The join-Lemmy page is English to begin with.
It uses the language configured in your browser. For me it shows in Spanish. We can also use browser language to filter the instance list without manual selection.
Join Lemmy button is redundant. In fact I don’t think it should even exist. All the buttons have got to go and people should directly see the “what are your interests” selection menu. Donation button can be on top, but I don’t think it’s handy to have it at onboarding when people don’t know what Lemmy is
Frontpage buttons and topic selection are definitely the trickiest part. I would consider removing the topic selection, because there are some which barely narrow it down (technology, general or politics each show a few dozen instances), or shows only a few instances which dont match well. Plus the topics are not actively maintained.
I made a PR with some changes to the frontpage: https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/pull/524
It seems that Australia introduced some similar laws recently, and we can expect other western countries to follow their example over the next years. These could be handled by builtint geoblocking in Lemmy, but I'm not sure if it would really be flexible enough.
Then there is also the case of countries blocking certain websites/instances via DNS, for example China. This is not so noticable now because we have few users from such countries, but it may also get more relevant as Lemmy grows. And this is not something which can be specified on the instance itself.
The cleanest solution would be to run a service in various countries which pings the different Lemmy instances to see if they are reachable. But that would be complex to setup, and expensive to host (unless we rely on volunteers, which makes it even more complex to manage).
You can also quick join with the third button "See all servers". Again the button texts are maybe not clear enough. It could make sense to add a button "Visit random instance" directly on the homepage, similar to #513. Not sure if that should go to registration or to the instance homepage, as the user may want to have a look around first.
@geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml also made some similar suggestions in a sibling comment.
NSFW instances are already excluded from the list.
Makes sense, I opened an issue for automatic language selection: https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/issues/519
The 5 clicks is with the selection dialog, if you click "See all servers" instead (or the "Join" button in the top menu), you get to the instance list directly and can be done with 2 clicks. What do you think about renaming the button "Join a server" to "Instance selection wizard" or similar?
The country blocks are tricky, to know about this we would have to add data for
allowed_countriesorblocked_countriesfor each instance (and keep it up to date). I guess you are in the UK?Thanks, opened a PR and also reported it in the lemmverse repo:
That is true. I made a post just now to gather suggestions for improving the website, please have a look and comment if you have any ideas: https://lemmyverse.link/lemmy.ml/post/41719890
There is nothing preventing apps from providing a registration flow. For example Voyager has it. I suppose the problem is again which instance to choose for signup. You can discuss this in https://lemmy.world/c/boostforlemmy or https://lemmy.world/c/lemmyapps.
As for multiple Lemmy apps being available: Most of the current Lemmy users came here in 2023 when Reddit locked down the API and killed third-party apps. Thats why a lot of apps are now available, and everyone can decide for himself which one he prefers.
Good point, I made a PR to use biased random sort again that we had in the past, so larger instances are always shown near the top.
The logic it uses is to hide any instances with more than 30% of all active users to prevent centralization, just like you say. There are also some other filters like requiring at least 5 active users.
There is a "Join" button which goes directly to the registration page of the respective instance. Would it be clearer to rename this? Other than that I'm also happy to make improvements if you have concrete suggestions.
Edit: Made a PR to rename Join to Sign Up: https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/pull/509
The onboarding is way too complicated for the average user. A huge part of this is that there are 100 ways to do it. Before you even can start to do anything you have to investigate and then decide on what and how to do it. And even then there is no guidance at all, you are given options and then you can either go and do some research again or try them one by one. You lose at least 90% of the users here already. It doesn’t help that fediverse users try to downplay this issue.
The solution to this is that people should not recommend Lemmy, but a specific instance such as programming.dev (depending on the audience). The Lemmy software and join-lemmy.org are mainly targeted at potential instance admins, or those who are already familiar with the Fediverse.
After that you are told that your registration needs to be approved manually and that there is no notification about that so you have to manually check from time to time whether your are able to login or not.
This is wrong or outdated, Lemmy definitely sends an email once your registration is approved or denied (if you provided an email during registration). Worth contacting the programming.dev admins to change this line.
We have an open issue for this: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5871
Good idea, thanks!
Yes, you can test it yourself by registering an account on voyager.lemmy.ml with the sidebar button (direct link). There are also lots of other new features available, I really need to write a post about them. To name just a few: private communities (followers require mod approval), webassembly plugins, post tags (ui is not finished yet), and more...
Then how do you expect the problem to get fixed? Do you think I'm a mind reader?
Did you open a bug report?
Lemmy supports federation with Peertube since a long time.
Seems like fetching the post listing from Peertube is broken, but you can fetch individual videos by url. Also if you follow a Peertube channel new videos will automatically be federated and show in your feed. If you encounter such problems please open an issue, we cant fix bugs that we are unaware of.
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).