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)
- 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
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.
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
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.
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.