Lemmy has limited federation with Bluesky and Threads. Lemmy itself isn’t being given with a non-commercial license so if any Lemmy instance grows large it’ll likely monetise and become a corporation.

if you have any specific suggestions for better images I would be happy to replace them.

Okay. I will give this some thought.

(tags) dont exist in Lemmy itself, and the ones defined on joinlemmy are practically unmaintained.

It’s unmaintained but at least it exists. I’m sure you’d go through the effort of updating them if an instance owner asked, right? So they’re probably still close enough. You do have data to present and it’s better than nothing.

For a normal user it shouldnt be necessary to understand federation before signing up.

But then what decision are they making? Both what decision are they actually making and what decision do they think they’re making? Knowing that they can interact with all* the instances is hugely transformative to your heuristics.

Number of linked/blocked instances

Number linked is good, but blocked has the problem of confusing narrow scope and being vigilant against spam. An instance might federate with everyone* but because it’s more maintained they also block more.

Is there any other information you would like

Cloudflare is useful to know for our privacy-consonous userbase. It might be kinda technical but if there is one or two stats visible the user cares about or at least understands then I don’t think having one they don’t understand matters. They essentially don’t understand “users” and that’s the main thing presented right now.

Extra clicks are not a big deal. You go through the wizard once. Extra cognitive load is the problem, and it’s abstracted as clicks or steps. But anyone who sees a language selector understands what is being asked of them and which language they need to pick.

Ask the user if they want to give Hitler a medal or a bullet. Medal redirects to .world and bullet to grad.👍 (This is a joke).

I think the colour scheme and dark-mode screenshots contributes to it looking daunting. You even have Matrix (the film)-text in the open source banner photo. The website looks like it’s trying to sell the Lemmy software instead of the Lemmy user experience/community. I think just changing those photos to gentler more iconographic or symbolic ones would go a long way towards making it lighter to process. In fact in-fact, those concepts don’t really need pictures to make them easier to communicate, but the features list probably does. There’s a paste-icon and then it says “Clean, mobile-friendly interface.”. I think just having a mobile screenshot would communicate that way better.

As for helping the user find an instance: If you can find a concise way to communicate what federation is, that’ll probably take some of the anxiety away. I don’t really know how. What do people think about maybe showing like a “80% federated” type stat? Tags would also help, because right now you’re basically going by the logo and name, and only when one catches your eye do you read the description. (You might immediately read the description of the first few presented). I think users probably want to compare by seeing structured information so the differences stand out. Since the description is free form it’s not 1-to-1 like tags would be. The current presentations makes user count seem by far the most important. And then once you’ve made that assumption you’ll probably make another assumption that user count determines how much content you can interact with.

On the internet imperialist English has been considered the default language. The join-Lemmy page is English to begin with.

I disagree with this. Anything to encourage other language use is good. And for me it builds confidence to see the selection. Both because I think the community is large enough to exist in other languages and because it signals the developer’s priorities. If there were good options in my preferred languages I would absolutely have joined a non-English instance instead. That’s not going to exist if the UI buries the option.

I agree with OP that block should be labelled mute, and agree with others in this thread that terminology should be consistent across ActivityPub applications and that the current Lemmy behaviour is the best behaviour for a block/mute button given Lemmy’s public nature.

Could Lemmy (if user consensus agrees with it) raise the topic to the ActivityPub developers?