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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 think it's great that it now sends people to an instance. One other recommendation is to not send people to the signup page but simply to the home page of the instance. For example a redirect goes to to thelemmy.club but it states that anyone who wants to join that server needs to wait for acceptance after creating an account. This is a major turnoff for new users
https://thelemmy.club/signup
Instead the redirect going to the home page https://thelemmy.club/ would be much better as people can instantly see Lemmy and what Lemmy actually is.
Its a difficult decision to send people to the homepage or the registration page. Homepage makes sense to explore like you say, but then someone might not find the registration button or dislike the frontpage posts and close the page. Registration page makes sense because with an account you can actually start voting, posting and following so you get the full experience. Its also what joinmastodon.org or pixelfed.org do.
I can see how that warning is a turnoff, but the registration approval is necessary to prevent spam bots. And its better to make users aware of that than having them think something is broken. In 1.0 there will be estimated approval time shown, and it will also be possible to use a plugin for automatic approval based on keywords.
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