[Help Design Lemmy] Joinlemmy website and New User Onboarding
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:
github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/pull/524
[Help Design Lemmy] How to describe Lemmy in a single Sentence?
On join-lemmy.org, the project is described as “A forum and link aggregator for the Fediverse”. In the previous post, multiple people mentioned that this is not a good description. However I have a hard time coming up with anything better.
So please post your suggestions below, and upvote the ones which are both accurate and easy to understand for new users. Later I pick one of the most upvoted options for the website.
By the way the second title “Follow communities Anywhere in the world” will likely go away (see the pull request for frontpage redesign). After this is decided I may also make another post to get suggestions for the longer description text below (“Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform. …”).
Edit: Please only post concrete suggestions in top-level comments, and use replies to discuss. And here you can see how a few other Fediverse projects do it:
Lemmy Development Update January 2025
Last month @Nutomic made some posts in !lemmy@lemmy.ml to get feedback and ideas for the official website join-lemmy.org:
- [Help Design Lemmy] Joinlemmy website and New User Onboarding
- [Help Design Lemmy] How to describe Lemmy in a single Sentence?
Based on these we made various changes to the site. Most importantly, visitors can now register on a suggested Lemmy instance with a single click. Additionally the feature overview, app list, and instance list were reworked.
join-lemmy.org is one of the first search results for people who hear about Lemmy, and want to find out what it is. They should easily be able to register an account to become an active user, with as little friction as possible.
So if you have any suggestions for further improvements, please open an issue or comment below. We especially need help from designers to create better images and polish the design. You can also contribute by translating the site to your language via Weblate.
Now on to the Lemmy code itself. On this front it has been mostly the same as last month: Implementing the new backend features in the UI, bug fixing and minor backend changes. You can follow the progress with these milestones:
If you are impatient to see the new features in production, we share those feelings. But there is still a lot of work needed to make sure the new features work well and make for a good user experience. If you have any experience with web development (or want to learn it), you can also contribute. Checkout the lemmy-ui repo and the milestone above. It is written in standard Typescript with Bootstrap. Additionally you can help by testing the new version on voyager.lemmy.ml and reporting any problems.
Finally here are the major changes from January:
- Added colour field to community tags by iByteABit256
- Make bootstrap instances configurable by Nutomic
- Added dedicated community and multi-community settings pages by Dessalines
- Partial url search and normalization (fixes #4748) by Nutomic
## matc-pub
- Change form-valid-color from _variables.litely.scss
## iByteABit256
- Added colour field to community tags
## electricatgit
- szmer.info: rm all langs besides pl
## dankxiaobong
- Fixed Development Setup Instructions in README
## MV-GH
- Fix #2050: Prevent superscript clashing with markdown footnotes
## dessalines
- Renaming tag -> community_tag
- Adding a ModlogKindDataType to modlog API endpoint.
- Using random username for denied user, in case of restarts
- Adding sort types for PersonQuery (IE admins) and LocalUserQuery.
- Upgrade pg_formatter to 5.9
- Fix private community content leaking in search and list person content
- Updating to account for changed tag and sidebars.
- Community tags
- Rename update to edit to match lemmy-js-client updates
- Fixing summary/description strings for new lemmy-js-client
- Adding a multi community settings page
- Move site settings and modlog to sidebar to match community.
- Fix missing emojis shortcode, remove linkEvent
- Fix incorrect login SSO class causing browser zoom.
- Get rid of crypto in favor of uuid.
- Add /feed urls to home, profile, community, and multicommunity.
- Removing all binds from codebase
- Community settings
- Don’t allow post_url_only and post_title_only to be checked at same time in search.
- Fixing comment create and comment edit loading indicators.
- Show error for failed reports.
- Instead of using disabled for paginator buttons, hide them.
- Fixing unread comment count showing -1 .
- Add versioning for nightly builds.
- Support avif pictures
- Fix the test.sh script env vars.
- Add word escaping for superscript and subscript.
- Add create community/multi-community buttons to those pages.
- Fix icon overflows by using inline-flex.
## Nutomic
- Upgrade reqwest, remove dependency aws-lc-sys
- Rename to sidebar again (fixes #6291)
- Change struct names from Update* to Edit* (fixes #6293)
- Move utils file to proper location
- Partial url search and normalization (fixes #4748)
- Ignore unknown tags on federated group (ref #6195)
- Enable pagination for VoteView (fixes #6162)
- Make bootstrap instances configurable (fixes #6260)
- Another fix for nightly versioning
- Correctly handle federated mentions (fixes #6218)
- Rename community.sidebar to description, and description to summary
- Various clippy fixes
- Fix nightly version by passing CI_PIPELINE_EVENT to Docker
- Add specific error for /api/v4/resolve_object with more details
- Remove webmanifest default description
- Show SSO buttons on registration page (fixes #3285)
- Show warning message to mods if community is not federated yet
- Post title on listing page should always open comments (fixes #3755)
- Use pattern to validate password length (fixes #3724)
- Change form-valid-border-color to green
- Hide deleted comments without children (fixes #3735)
- Change country to “hosted in”, add continent filter
- Limit content width to 1024px
- Add regional topic (fixes #540)
- Use absolute link for news (fixes #441)
- Fix markdown rendering for news
- Cleanup recommended instances
- Remove unnecessary lint rules
- Update Dockerfile (fixes #549)
- Add missing isBrowser checks (ref #549)
- Remove glide
- Frontpage changes
- Use folder for crawl results
- Handle long country name for instances
- Update webpack
- Rename pnpm start to pnpm dev
- Filter instance list by user language (fixes #519)
- Filter apps by user agent
- Country filter using geoip, change stats (fixes #527)
- Add link to fediverse.observer map
- Use link icons (fixes #530)
- Add featured to Activitypub context (fixes #500)
- Highlight app links for selected type, simplify definitions
- Downscale images
- Remove unused Plausible script
- Change Lemmyverse link to instance list
- Use biased random for instance list
- Rename Join to Sign Up in instance list
- Update donation amounts
Or see the full list of changes at the links below:
An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and Nutomic work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. The only available option are user donations.
To keep it viable donations need to reach a minimum of 5000€ per month, resulting in a modest salary of 2500€ per developer. If that goal is reached we can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.