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
Just sending to random instance without telling the user seems misleading, at would be better to show a list of instances in my opinion (or have "show me more instances".
Searching for categories by text could also be helpful.
I recently pushed out an update that shows a preview instead of just sending them to it (with a button where someone can get a new instance for the category). I updated the post to reflect that now
Similar ish to what you said but I've been keeping it at 1 instance shown at a time to stop choice paralysis (but they can see other ones in the category now by getting a new 1 instance)