Good suggestion, thanks!

The target audience is basically anyone who comes across Lemmy somewhere, looks for it via search engine and ends up on join-lemmy.org. So in other words, anyone really. Including people without any prior knowledge, nor technical knowledge.

On joinmastodon.org I only see a single sentence at the top: “Social networking that’s not for sale.”

Btw I didnt get any extra notifications from this comment, so no worries. And thank you!

Coincidentally thats exactly what I did:

Still needs some more changes though.

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This would make instance creation too complicated.

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.

This one is too long, I would only use the first part:

Lemmy is an open-source social network that functions as a global web of independent forums

Sounds good, but I would keep the Fediverse in somehow, eg “A federated discussion platform for communities”.

“Decentralized” may not be technical, but still its a long and complex word. “Fediverse” seems friendlier to me.

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.

Yes this is pretty much the direction I’m going in based on previous comments here.

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:

https://joinmastodon.org/
https://joinpeertube.org/
https://pixelfed.org/how-to-join

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

This also makes a lot of sense, showing regional instances can make the choice much easier. Opened issue: https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/issues/527

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)

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

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.

Again see https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/pull/524

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

True the texts should be a bit bigger. https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/issues/528

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.

Opened an issue here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/issues/525

Ah that makes sense, made a note to change that.

No worries, thanks for the helpful feedback!

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:

• Number of linked/blocked instances
• Downvotes enabled
• Languages

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).

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.

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.