Lol the keywords list is hilarious, imagine publishing a list of things that rustle your jimmies.

Fair play, I was more coming from a place of you maybe wanting to do something about that if you’re gonna have a button that sends people to a random instance.

I should have said at the start btw, thanks for all the work you guys do

I thought about the ping-instances-from-different-regions, but figured it would be impractical to do this for every country, and would potentially end up hitting false positives/negatives around bot detection tooling such as the cloudflare captcha screen with some instances.

Definitely not a simple one to solve!

NSFW instances are already excluded from the list.

You may have a regression in prod then, I added that point to my comment because I got lemmynsfw at the top of the list on one of my refreshes somehow

I guess you are in the UK

How did you guess…! haha

I imagine we’re one of the main demographics affected by this in terms of Lemmy traffic share, but I’m sure there must be other countries that face similar blocks

The country blocks are tricky […]

Yeah I had a bit of a think to try and come up with a practical solution that was less of a manual exercise, but I couldn’t think of anything simple. The other solution I came up with is much more involved, where Lemmy offers geoblocking as a built-in feature to allow the instances to self-report their geoblocking config in a consistent way.

If it’s too impractical/too much of a maintenance burden to solve, we will probably have to live with it, but I wanted to raise it for visibility regardless.

What do you think about renaming the button “Join a server” to “Instance selection wizard” or similar?

So from a UX point of view, I went for the most obvious CTA to get me started from my perspective.

Just had a look again and the quick join is behind the hamburger menu on mobile, so I’d say add a CTA for that of equal prominence next to the wizard CTA.

I’m not a copy guy so I’m not sure what’s the best wording to use to make the two options distinct. It needs to offer the “sign me up quick” Vs “I want to customise my choice” user journeys clearly

Brainstorming, perhaps the “just sign me up” button could even take you straight to the sign up page of the random top instance in the list. Perhaps with a self-redirecting interstitial page to let them know where they’re going if that’s not super old-school

Another semi-related issue, perhaps you want to consider down-weighting nsfw instances in the list too, as I’d guess the average user would probably not otherwise choose one of those as their home instance.

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

Yes by default, though it should be possible to post without joining the wider discussion, imagine (whatever you think about them) “shit X says” metacommunities’ discussion getting mixed in with the sincere commenters

The bits just have that analogue warmth that you don’t get with conventional drives

What is extremely political to one person is just someone simply existing to another.

The term “no politics” in internet communities often actually means “only things that align with my politics”. I’ve seen it over and over again for as long as I can remember

Wow, probably not what you were shooting for, but I had no idea wickr was AWS

So I thought the biggest issue with Lemmy and Google’s pagerank is that federated content looks a lot like that blogspam that just aggregates content from elsewhere.

Perhaps they’re adapting things