this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2023
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Lemmy

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For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.

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Following remote communities is hard. (beehaw.org)
submitted 1 year ago by Raincloud@beehaw.org to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml
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It's easy to discover communities on my instance via the dedicated page in the hamburger menu. But let's say I want to follow a community on another instance, such as !lemmy@lemmy.ml . I might have found its name mentioned in a post or comment. When I click on the provided link, I'm thrown on that instances web page, from which I of course can't subscribe.

So what I instead have to do is to copy the description of the link and paste it in my instance's search bar. Which isn't easy, since it's a link, so there isn't even a straightforward way to select the link text without clicking the link. This seems very unintuitive and makes the process of joining a whole bunch of communities tedious. Is there a better way?

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[–] andrew@radiation.party 7 points 1 year ago

Two things that would definitely massively improve first-time-user-experience are

  1. Better community discoverability / joinability.
  • Maybe having the Lemmy instances advertise the communities they know about? Allow communities to opt-out of this discovery process? It's could be kind of like /channels list on IRC.
  • Maybe add a "subscribe" quick-button next to links that lead to known (by the instance) communities? That way the friction-to-subscribe is way lower
  1. A way for an instance to "pre-subscribe" users to certain communities by default - maybe even as part of a "user setup wizard" wherein the instance owner can curate a list of communities, and the user that's signing up can one-click-subscribe to all, or choose which ones to subscribe to, as part of the post-registration journey.

Totally food for thought there, and possibly low-hanging fruit to improve UX massively. The initial experience is painful on a small instance that doesn't have many known communities yet.