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

all 37 comments

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I just played with the background of the website homepage for 10 mins, send help

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I'm glad I'm not the only one

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's probably using particles.js

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

For the background I used tsParticles for the particles, and the gradient behind that uses framer motion to change colors by moving a linear gradient back and forth

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Interesting, thanks for response

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Instances have been added if they have a decent amount of activity and dont break the programming.dev rules (no hate speech, no illegal content, no lolicon). The ones currently here are just basically ones that I know exist but other ones can get added if someone sends me links to them or an issue gets opened on the repository

Sure I could adapt it a bit to do that. I can show info on one and then add in a refresh button to get a new instance in that category or something similar.

And sure I can move regional into their own category

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sounds great, looking forward to seeing how this develops :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Letting you know that I pushed an update to the site. Shows a preview of an instance with description, uptime, users amount, communities amount, where its hosted, and software, instead of sending the user to it instantly.

And regional has their own caategory + some other stuff moved around

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

That was so fast, thanks for the update!

I'll share it around with friends :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You might already have this one, but in case it helps: https://lemmy.ca/post/3051719

Someone linked this list with more specialized instances

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

thanks, ill look through it for stuff to add to pangora once im done with ludum dare

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

for topic based instances. I was just looking for an updated list the other day.

I've got a pretty good list here: https://kbin.social/m/specialized_instances/t/186667/Big-list-of-specialized-instances

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Wow, that GUI is beautiful. And the site works really well, too!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

This is great. I was checking through the categories, and I had no idea there's a science instance. I came to know about my present instance from reading posts here. Finding interest related instances has been so difficult.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@Ategon amazing job! Thanks for it.

It would be nice to have instances of different languages as well!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Sure I can add in some language handling

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

what would be even cooler is if it automatically subscribed you to communities based on the answers you gave

or at least listed them out? I think Lemmy will soon have an option to import a list of communities to subscribe to all at once

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3976

could either copy paste the json for it, or do it through the api after the account is created?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Couple things I think would have to be added for this to work. One would be tagging communities based on the content in them so these subscribe lists dont have to be constantly manually updated and instead can be set on a community level. Then would be handling for taking in the category from the url and saving that so its used later when they sign up (I dont think base lemmy would want to integrate behaviour from the pangora site but it could be integrated into instances running pangora)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

One would be tagging communities based on the content in them so these subscribe lists dont have to be constantly manually updated and instead can be set on a community level.

eh instances don't have this either and yet you associate instances with these tags, I think a hardcoded list is fine and it doesn't need to be anywhere near complete or perfectly up to date, just a starting point or suggestions

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

the difference with instances and communities is theres 1k instances and 30k communities. Communities are also created and removed as a much faster pace than instances and there would be different lists per instance (or the same, idk. Just thinking people might get auto subscribed to a bunch of different communities on the same topic, or instead an instance would get ignored)

Going to be making community flairs anyways in pangora so can just add it on

[–] rustyriffs 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is there a way to integrate this into a frontend? I use alexandrite, because I find the default UI attrocious

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've been working on a new frontend (pangora-ui) thats a similar style in terms of design. Theres some progress over in [email protected]. These features can't be put into that though since the frontend is instance specific (lemmy-ui equivalent) and this is for all instances (join-lemmy equivalent)

[–] rustyriffs 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's pretty exciting. Will it be able to be used on desktop? Also, does it open posts/links internally without leaving the main page? (That is my main reason for using Alexandrite, because it's the only replacement I've found that has that behavior). If the UI is like that I would definitely be willing to check it out.

Also will it have any features that Alexandrite doesn't?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Being made primarily for desktop (or mobile as a PWA). Currently it opens up a new page for the post since ive been doing the same page routes as lemmy-ui but that sort of behaviour is neat. Might need to add something like it

It supports more markdown than base lemmy and the alternate uis (code blocks, latex, etc.). Supports hotkeys to do various things. Has a better community list with more info. Mostly the same features as lemmy-ui for non pangora instances apart from these but looks better than lemmy-ui. (pangora is a lemmy soft fork to add features on top of it)

Theres a bunch of stuff itll have added on but only for instances that are running pangora since thats how I get the info about them (planning to add in user tagging, better mod tools, letting communities follow other communities to get their posts in the community feed, letting communities set other communities so that their comments show in the comment section as well if a post is cross posted between them, and a bunch of other stuff)

Only instance thats guaranteed to be running pangora is programming.dev but some others might also use it

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Curious where my instance lands.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

lemmyf isnt currently listed since its one of the instances that I had no idea existed. Would be under nsfw though

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Pornlemmy.com returns a server error.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So when does the random instance is chosen? When the website is loaded? When the user clicks on a category?

Maybe currently there aren't enough instances categorised on the website to get enough randomness.

Is there, or would there be, a weight in the randomness in order to chose closer instances based on the user's location?

For example sh.itjust.works is an instance based in Canada. When the reddit exodus happened. That instance was slow due to the distance. While others closer to the western europe were faster because they where closer to me.

Tho rn, it's about the same. So not sure.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Instance is chosen when theres no subcategories for what the user selected

As an example of that when someone first goes to the site they get shown the 10 main categories (technology, gaming, sports, etc.). If they select technology they are then shown the technology subcategories (programming, android, radio, general). if they select general technology that has no subcategories so they are randomly sent to one of the three general technology instances (discuss.tchncs.de, lemmy.sdf.org, or infosec.pub)

A lot of the categories only have one site it sends to but thats fine for now since it still is distributing people to the different sites based on categories

Im not looking at location data at all but in the everything/other category theres countries that can be selected to send the user to country instances

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hmm, ok. I see. When clicking on the last button in a category tree, it chooses randomly an instance.

Tho for that specific category, I cannot access https://lemmy.sdf.org/. Why? I don't know, maybe broken or regional block?

If regional block, that is an argument to warts looking at user location. Tho not sure if it would be useful for anything else.

It would also be interesting to categorize more instances. Maybe even put smaller ones to distribute the load. Tho sometimes the smaller ones may not be well prepared for a lot of users. And at the same time the local feed may not be the most active. Tho the all feed may be interesting for new users.

The instance where I am, compuverse.uk is a general tech/computer instance, but had issues with storage for example.

[–] roy_mustang76 2 points 1 year ago

Lemmy.sdf.org is where my main is hosted, but they're currently down (as is their pixelfed instance)

It's not just you / a regional block.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Your website needs JS to work and has unnecessary bloat.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Lemmy itself needs JS to work, wouldnt make sense to limit myself to not using it when the sites im sending people to dont have that restriction. Whats the bloat youre talking about, I can look at it