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
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)
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
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