I literally cannot conceive of a more efficient arrangement of 17 monitors

Conclusive proof all species of geese are assholes

Make your website feel like a single-page app — without JavaScript

Oh, intriguing! I wonder how they do that

Step 1: add this JS to your page

Oh.

Goddamn so everyone’s a bastard, eh?

45 bucks gets you on with a FAKE one?

What’s a REAL ID?

I’m sorry they let people get on planes without ID in the US?!

I care

If that’s all that was needed to justify it

If you’re using python for anything other than academia or AI, you’re using the wrong tool

That movement is still energy

Build a circuit to make use of that et voilà

Friction makes heat. Same thing really

Huh, typically you’d set an instance to scale out, not in when CPU usage spikes

I’m getting tired of all this

the only stuff that’s really on there is some music, photos, backups. If it gets lost, nothing important really is lost.

Photos are pretty important to a lot of people, I know that’s the most obvious thing on my server that people would miss and not be able to get anywhere else

Economics is a funny one as ultimately it’s a focused & technical strand of anthropology (which I believe is considered a science by many) that people often incorrectly lump in with maths.

Kinda tough for an academic to run meaningful experiments on an actual economy though beyond models and simulation. And as anyone who has watched a Gary Stevenson video or two will know, your average academic economist is pretty bad at models and simulations.

Though I guess even bad experiments are still experiments

Edit: typo

Depends how big they explode

Beyond a certain point, there are explosions that only really start being a problem at the point of explosion

America. I shouldn’t need to tell you that trees exploding is a sign we’re not on the right path

Fair play, I was more coming from a place of you maybe wanting to do something about that if you’re gonna have a button that sends people to a random instance.

I should have said at the start btw, thanks for all the work you guys do

I thought about the ping-instances-from-different-regions, but figured it would be impractical to do this for every country, and would potentially end up hitting false positives/negatives around bot detection tooling such as the cloudflare captcha screen with some instances.

Definitely not a simple one to solve!

NSFW instances are already excluded from the list.

You may have a regression in prod then, I added that point to my comment because I got lemmynsfw at the top of the list on one of my refreshes somehow

I guess you are in the UK

How did you guess…! haha

I imagine we’re one of the main demographics affected by this in terms of Lemmy traffic share, but I’m sure there must be other countries that face similar blocks

The country blocks are tricky […]

Yeah I had a bit of a think to try and come up with a practical solution that was less of a manual exercise, but I couldn’t think of anything simple. The other solution I came up with is much more involved, where Lemmy offers geoblocking as a built-in feature to allow the instances to self-report their geoblocking config in a consistent way.

If it’s too impractical/too much of a maintenance burden to solve, we will probably have to live with it, but I wanted to raise it for visibility regardless.

What do you think about renaming the button “Join a server” to “Instance selection wizard” or similar?

So from a UX point of view, I went for the most obvious CTA to get me started from my perspective.

Just had a look again and the quick join is behind the hamburger menu on mobile, so I’d say add a CTA for that of equal prominence next to the wizard CTA.

I’m not a copy guy so I’m not sure what’s the best wording to use to make the two options distinct. It needs to offer the “sign me up quick” Vs “I want to customise my choice” user journeys clearly

Brainstorming, perhaps the “just sign me up” button could even take you straight to the sign up page of the random top instance in the list. Perhaps with an self-redirecting interstitial page to let them know where they’re going if that’s not super old-school

Another semi-related issue, perhaps you want to consider down-weighting nsfw instances in the list too, as I’d guess the average user would probably not otherwise choose one of those as their home instance.

Because I’ve not looked at it since I signed up 2.5y ago, just went through to see how many clicks to get to a sign up page.

5 clicks is maybe slightly on the “too many” side. Perhaps language selection could be auto selected by browser language and/or default to multi.

Though randomness highlighted a 2nd issue that might not be especially visible. I got Lemmy.zip as my top suggestion so I hit the sign up button and I was greeted by a “blocked in my country because my government are idiots” page. Now I understand why the admins have made that choice, but for a new user who stumbles onto Lemmy by accident, does the 5 clicks and gets greeted by a user journey terminating error page, it’s probably going to result in a fair amount of bounce.

Now I know it can’t be perfect given instances don’t declare by API where they are available, so I guess it would need to be a manually curated list, but maybe a feature to push instances down the list if they’re geoblocked in the user’s IP country

I wish I still had time for advent of code…

I wanted to say I’m ambivalent to text rendering

But that would be a lie to myself, I actually care about it quite a lot.

Most of my life is reading shit on screens; it’d better be good