[Help Design Lemmy] Joinlemmy website and New User Onboarding

• The term Link Aggregator has got to go. Call it a forum and call it a day

• 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

• See all servers button at the top as well

• 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.

• If possible let their first server be a general one without email verification so they can quickly join

• Most people don't have a preference for interests, I'd make one giant button on the left saying "all" or " general" or something like that which just directly sends you to a "general" server, and one on the right which allows to select interests.

• Images of Lemmy at the bottom are a bit confusing maybe? undecided on that

• "All topics" and "General" is redundant

Selecting interests for personalized experience is something which should happen on an account basis imo. Reddit lets users select their interests and bases their frontpage algorithm on that. And people can change those filters if they so wish to get a different feed. That's customization on an account level, not on instance level.

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.

I appreciate that you are gathering community feedback!

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

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?

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.

And the list of apps, what can be done here? For one thing the data is rarely updated, so we would appreciate pull requests.

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)

If I were to try and critique the site in excessive detail, from top to bottom:

• 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
• 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
• 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.
  • Join a serve and See all servers are very similar for a user that's not familiar with how this all works, and they end up in the same place. So instead of a popup, could you have it as a responsive widget on the instance's page? That way users can quickly figure out how the instances are tagged
  • Since the donate button is already in the header, it might be better to have a large section on donations further down the page.
• The paragraph is a large block of text. I'd prefer something closer to what Peertube did
• The screenshots could be larger and more prominent
• 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/
• 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

On the servers page:

• The community explorer and fediverse observer are external sites, but they look like widgets right now.
• 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?
• 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

Because I've not looked at it since I signed up 2.5y ago, just went through to see how many clicks to get to a sign up page.

5 clicks is maybe slightly on the "too many" side. Perhaps language selection could be auto selected by browser language and/or default to multi.

Though randomness highlighted a 2nd issue that might not be especially visible. I got Lemmy.zip as my top suggestion so I hit the sign up button and I was greeted by a "blocked in my country because my government are idiots" page. Now I understand why the admins have made that choice, but for a new user who stumbles onto Lemmy by accident, does the 5 clicks and gets greeted by a user journey terminating error page, it's probably going to result in a fair amount of bounce.

Now I know it can't be perfect given instances don't declare by API where they are available, so I guess it would need to be a manually curated list, but maybe a feature to push instances down the list if they're geoblocked in the user's IP country

just keep up the great work as usual!

In the instance list, the link to https://lemmyverse.net/communities seems broken right now, it only works if you remove the /communities path and then navigate to communities from the UI itself (it seems to be their own bug, it also happens if you go to the communities tab and refresh the page). Maybe the link could change to point to https://lemmyverse.net/ instead.

Created an issue for it: 516

I think the description starts off too technical - "link aggregator" is correct, but not a term that many people know about. "Selfhosted" might even be lost on most people.

Perhaps something more simple would help as a first introduction, there's plenty of opportunity for the more technical-minded to learn more. Maybe calling it a "network of content-sharing and discussion forums"? I'd love to put "decentralized" at the front, although I'm not sure how obvious that term is.

Just be careful to not drive all traffic to only large instances, because then people who run smaller ones may not get enough users to keep doing it. How healthy will Lemmy be if everyone uses the same five instances?

Its already a bit of a problem with the large instances being so dominating.

It should show the user an instance based on their IP, location, browser language etc. and perhaps the list of possible instances should be hardcoded.

Then also give the user the ability to see all servers.

Maybe useful for reference... https://redditinc.com/

Interesting that they don't even attempt to put a label on what type of website Reddit is, they just describe its features. IDK if that's good or bad lol. Maybe for Lemmy you'd want to start with "discussion forum" and then describe additional features.

I think this has been proposed before, but i think that the instance with the most users (whatever it may be) should be deprioritized on join-lemmy, for the health of the federation. Its not like people won't come into contact with the largest instance like right away anyway (and could just kale a new account if they really want to)

I haven’t looked at that site in a few years.

One thing I always think about though, in order to get a better distribution of users across instances, maybe not put the biggest instances at the top (like Lemmy.world) but instead put active medium to large size instances at the very top. But not that they are too small or too inactive such that user signs up on an instance which is not properly maintained or used, giving them a bad experience and possibly losing their instance/account.

And maybe offer different levels of option selection for any type of sign up wizard. Like advanced options could let you specify a bunch of stuff. But maybe have a simple option, like googles old “I’m feeling lucky” button. But you might call it “Pick an active instance for me” or something like that. Which might again use the above sizing and activity guidelines to pick an instance for them.

Two ideas i like:

linking to a bunch of platforms that have reviews of lemmy, fynd does this:

A neodb instance (but maybe another platform would do) where you can read and write reviews about fediverse instances (but that would require at least one volunteer to moderate it).

Ok so I think it would be best to have two ways: One really completely foolproof way, where the user does not need to know a single thing about the technologies involved. 0 upfront homework for the user.

And then a second way for users willing to take the time to do a 'manual setup'.

I created an AI slop clickable mockup real quick as it's easier to bring the idea across than describing it with lots of words. This only covers the foolproof way.

https://jsfiddle.net/da9m4nuq/

The main idea being to remove all possible friction for users who are the opposite of tech savvy - which imo are the absolute majority of all users.

The tricky part is preselecting a server for them. This will probably need a more or less manually curated list of servers which most people will be okay with - so no extreme opinions, not technical, big enough so they don't seem empty on first sight. Done in such a way that the people get more or less equally distributed, so we don't create one centralized instance.

But I think it is crucial to remove any friction for the users. Don't let them do homework before they even know what Lemmy is and if it's worth it at all.

I think the main problem is the green color chosen for the website. It gives a "matrix" vibe and makes people think it's for hackers and stuff like that. It's okay to have green accents but I think most of the color should be replaced by something else. White color should be more permanent.

Also I noticed that the performance on firefox Android is pretty poor.

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?

I do think the "topic"/"language" selection screens make sense overall.

Also what i noticed is that on http://join-lemmy.org/ when you select certain topics (like "Art/literature" and "german speaking"), then the resulting instance list is empty. It might be wise to show at least one instance for every search query, even if it's not 100% fit. For example, at least display one generic-topic instance for your language or one english-language instance for your topic.

Also it would be neat if instance admins could automatically set a certain set of "subscribed instances/communities" and "blocked instances/communities" for each new user that signs up on their instance. That would make it easier for instances to give themselves a certain "flavor" so users have an easier time finding interesting stuff.

On the new UI i'm not sure what is the difference between "country" and "language" (btw "Country" isn't translated in the french version, the translation would be "Pays"). What I can guess is that "country" is the country where the server are hosted, but I'm far from sure with the current wording (and I'm a technical person, most peoples would definitively not guess it). If that is the case, I would rename it with "hosted in" or something similar.

Concerning the language selection I also find it disturbing to not be able to select multiple language (in my case I speak both french and english, so I would want to select both but not "all language" as I don't speak german for example). If you allow multiple language selection then instances speaking both language should be displayed before the ones where they speak only one of the language (I don't know if instances with multiple language exists right now ? but we could imagine it in the future).

One user told me they got to https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/01-getting-started.html when they tried to sign up instead of to https://join-lemmy.org/ so maybe it would be good to have an easily-visible link there that brings you to the main landing page?