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
I've been working on a new frontend (pangora-ui) thats a similar style in terms of design. Theres some progress over in !pangora@programming.dev. 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)
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?
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