We are not running Anubis, although we do block a large number of AI/LLM companies through IP addresses. Each time we block a new one, it makes a noticeable difference in the performance graphs.

https://lemmy.nz/ and https://quokk.au/ are running Anubis, and so those admins may be able to offer insight :)

!lemmy411@lemmy.ca would be best for that. You can also ask in the various c/nostupidquestions communities

Regional Instances for Quick Join sounds cool, looking forward to it :)

Not sure how you mean. Is it too complicated to make a pull request and edit the file I linked above?

Not at all, I accidentally quoted the wrong text in my reply. I meant to reply to this bit: “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)”.

I was proposing having an automated system that uses the server IP (or another method), and then overriding it with any manually entered information from that file. That could be paired with an extra visual indicator or filter method to differentiate between the two.

Its not random from the whole list, but selected from a curated list (currently only lemmus.org and thelemmy.club, see #545). Its displayed like this because a lot of people complained that choosing an instance is too complicated.

That’s fair. Maybe you could add a line above those buttons saying something like “We have picked a random instance for you to try:”

That might be enough for the user to understand that the highlighted instance is not official / run by your team.

The images are not great, I will make a similar post soon to get contributions, and feedback for better texts.

Sounds great, looking forward to it

regarding the join button, I actually just saw a user have that same misunderstanding: https://old.reddit.com/r/Silksong/comments/1qltxzy/announcing_our_official_sister_community/o1hlnk3/

I just took another look at the site, and I love the new changes already!

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

I see the developer also found the issue, great to hear that you both might be collaborating.

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.

That’s a good point. I like the images you have currently, and I’ll keep an eye out for anything that might be better.

True these havent been updated in a long time. Any specific features that you would emphasize?

A few of them have nice big cards now, so those could be combined. Otherwise the features that I personally would have been interested in are (in no particular order):

• Emojis with autocomplete support. Start typing :
• User tagging using @, Community tagging using !: You could also emphasize that this works across instances. For example: “Tagging users and communities from any federated instance”
• Integrated image uploading in both posts and comments.
• i18n / internationalization support for > 30 languages
• RSS / Atom feeds for All, Subscribed, Inbox, User, and Community.
• By hosting your own server, you can be in full control of your content.

Instances can have multiple topics, in fact you can make a PR to this file to update it yourself.

Thanks, I made a note for our team to look into that in the future!

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’s a good point, I’m also not sure if there is a good way for instance admins to change that on Pixelfed’s site. I don’t have a strong preference either way, but having some way for admins to update the information would be ideal. Perhaps an automated system with custom overrides through a file on the GitHub?

Some more feedback on the current version of the site:

• It might be good to indicate that the instance in the first card is a random instance, and not an official or ‘flagship’ instance. That way, if it links to a poorly moderated / maintained instance, it doesn’t reflect poorly on the project. My personal preference would be to have the Browse All Servers be the primary button, and then the join button be secondary. A refresh button might also work: “Refresh for a new randomly selected server”
• Very minor, but some of the images are light mode while others are dark mode. It might look better if it was consistent

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

That is possible

To get a link post with a custom thumbnail, you add the link and put the image in the thumbnail field.

To get an image post with a link, you make an image post and put the link in the post body.

There are exceptions to all of the points below, but generally:

What do you like better here than on Reddit?

Everyone is here trying to build something better. The developers are actually prioritizing transparency and user choice when making the software. Since the instances aren’t after profit, there’s no financial conflict of interest. It’s actually possible for instance admins to prioritize user experience and a healthy community instead of making a profit.

I love seeing all the different organizational structures emerging; some instances are nonprofits, some are co-ops, some are benevolent dictatorships. I think in the long run this will produce a fairer and more representative online platform.

Also my interactions feel human. If I get 5 upvotes on Lemmy or 5 likes on Pixelfed, it feels like I connected with 5 real people. On Reddit, I just can’t tell anymore.

What do you miss from Reddit?

Activity in niche communities, but that’s changing slowly.

Also, as a mod, we could still use better moderation tooling.

Do you feel the culture here is genuinely different, or does it eventually drift the same way?

I think over time it will become more like Reddit. As the user base grows, the average will shift closer to what Reddit is like. Also, at the end of the day, a number of the issues are because of how groups of humans interact and not the platform itself.

However, the reason I’m here instead of the many other Reddit alternatives is because of federation. I believe that as long as we maintain a healthy balance in the fediverse (and not let one entity control too much), we can avoid the enshitification while centralized social media becomes unbearable for more and more people.

It’s still helpful for messages. The social share/thumbnail isn’t always available

A user is more likely to click on

https://unfamiliar.site/c/cats/192837/my-cat-napping-in-the-sun

compared to

https://unfamiliar.site/post/192837

I’m not saying that this should take priority over all the other things the developers are doing, but I’d still like to see it implemented at some point

Nice, I like it :)

You could add a word or phrase to remind people that it’s being given away for free to anyone that wants to run it. That might get people to think about any benefit they are getting out of it, and how much they want to donate in response.

I’m not sure what is the best wording for that, but just be careful in case someone misunderstands and thinks it might become paid someday. I’ve seen that complaint in the past

For example, this could be misinterpreted:

and if you want to keep using it for free

You can also add a note about the frequency of the messages. Saying that you will only remind people once a year is nice to hear, and that way people won’t dismiss it thinking they will do it when they are reminded the next time

I think this is being worked on / discussed in the background for how to best implement this. There are a lot of complications when you get into the details of how it should work

In the meantime, another perspective is that even on centralized platforms there will be multiple communities for a particular theme. Especially at first, there may be a few communities for something before one of them will win out as THE community for it.

That’s already happened here for a few communities, where there is ONE main community for a topic.

For others, it’s still in the early stages or (like on Reddit) there are multiple concurrent communities for ideological reasons.

The exception would be if something is created or thought of on the platform, in which case there may only be one community for it from the start. For example, !taneggs@lemmy.ca was a fun idea that started here and has grown into a solid community now (thanks to @DaMonsterKnees@lemmy.world regular posts 😊).

Some Lemmy compatible platforms do stuff like that

• allow you to see both Lemmy style content and Microblog style content in the same platform
• allow you to follow individual users.
• include hashtags that federate out so the Lemmy posts appear under that hashtag for microblog users

Something like that could work, as long as it’s an additional option and not a change to how communities currently work.

Mixing hashtags with communities sounds like a bad idea because of how much content would come in at once. For example, there are a few RSS feed communities and already those ones are overwhelming to keep up with. Most posts sit with no comments and 1 vote, which doesn’t work for the vote & comment based way we organize content here.

We can improve how we federate these platforms together, but I prefer the tagging method. That way it’s a conscious decision to post a microblog post in a community.

Welcome!

For this universe of instances to grow, but also to add a bit of personality to the platform! Do a bit of Reddit and add customization options for each community, like on the Minecraft Subreddit of old Reddit that I’ve always smiled at.

For sure! We don’t talk enough about how much customization there is for Lemmy. There is a wide variety of mobile apps that do things in different ways, and userscripts/userstyles to customize the desktop interface. A lot of instances are also running multiple frontends, each maintained by a different dev or team.

For example, our instance is running:

• Voyager interface at voyager.lemmy.ca
• Photon interface at photon.lemmy.ca
• Alexandrite interface at alex.lemmy.ca

Many possibilities, and I’m hoping we can see community customization too someday :)

I like sea otters

Thanks! Just joined :)

Some alternative frontends and apps have it that way, but the default Lemmy UI doesn’t I believe.

This should be the relevant issue:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1401

I do like your ad ideas nonetheless @zabadoh@lemmy.ml. If we were swimming in money, it could be more of a discussion

A near black screen with small text at the bottom would be fun. “Ads suck, so we removed one for you. Come to the Fediverse for ad-free social media”