Hey everyone! I recently finished up an instance selector similar to join-lemmy. There are a couple issues with join-lemmy with it sending the majority of people to the general purpose instances instead of growing the niche instances, as well as giving people way too many options at once which can turn into choice paralysis.
The selector will be the default when people visit the pangora site and people can also use it to select lemmy instances instead of using join-lemmy since im keeping pangora and lemmy as close to each other as possible.
How it works:
- Users are presented with 10 main categories (technology, sports, art, etc.). They can choose one which will be the category of content they primarily look at
If a category has no subcategories they will then be sent to a random instance for that category (e.g. if they choose sports they get sent to fanaticus)Update: If a category has no subcategories they are shown a preview of a random instance for that category (e.g. if they choose sports they get a preview of fanaticus to look at and then possibly click visit)- Else if a category has subcategories they are then shown those to pick from (e.g. technology when selected will show programming, radio, etc.) (and when selected repeat previous step)
I added almost every active instance to the site so feel free to use it to check out some other instances for various topics
Hope you enjoy :)
site: https://pangora.social/join
source code: https://github.com/PangoraWeb/pangora.social
This looks great, and would be a nice place to redirect people for topic based instances. I was just looking for an updated list the other day.
How do you pick which ones to keep and which ones to skip? For example, there are a few film/TV/music instances and there will probably be more soon.
Feedback:
add some more information on who owns/runs the instances, and maybe show the recommended instance instead of redirecting to it without warning. This page could include the details on the instance, and you could still “highly recommend” one instance
move the regional instances out from under “other”. This was important to me as a lot of the relevant communities to me are regional (I follow what’s happening in my city, province, country, school, etc.). I have interests in FOSS, science, etc., but I wouldn’t pick my instance for any one of those.
It could also help with latency if users are located in one region, and users would have more control over things like where the data is stored or how the non profit is set up. I like knowing that my instance is setting up a non-profit in my country, and that it is following our local privacy / security laws.
Also like the other user said, you could offer to use location when the user picks “random” (or just redirect them to that page), citing the reasons above.