Product Designer
You probably don’t want my code if you want a stable platform. ;)
That said, I dig what y’all are doing, and I’m veteran experience / interaction designer who’s been around the block for a few decades. So I might be able to find some time to mockup some experience concepts and or help to run user tests with audiences that your curious about.
IMHO, selecting an instance is definitely the biggest user experience problem Lemmy has at the moment. New users who are unfamiliar with the platform are going to pick the biggest instances, and that’s going to create performance problems.
We’ll need to prioritize work on instance browsing. Lemmy has outgrown the experience over at join-lemmy.org. If I could wave a magic wand, instance browsing and onboarding would have a way to show instance capacity / performance, a way to categorize and filter instances, and a way to recommend instances based upon interests. That would probably help to spread people out more evenly.
Hiding subscriber counts is intentional at join-Lemmy.org. They were being displayed about 2 weeks ago, but new users saw them, viewed actively as a form of social proof, and only signed up with large instances.
Problem is, those large instances are starting to break now. They can’t scale fast enough to meet demand.
Moreover, if you signup for a small instance, you can still subscribe to communities from another instance. Communities are shared between instances.
IMHO, we should be displaying stats like response time and integration with the federation network. That’s what is actually important for most folks. If you only focus on local activity, you’re going to have a bad time.