People don’t know better because the system is geared towards ensuring the average person doesn’t understand politics.

They look for the most visible change and place all the blame on that, and they don’t understand that the most visible thing is usually a symptom of a deeper issue.

We all need to be making sure every time shit goes bad due to right wing politics, that we don’t let them pin it on one guy. The whole school of thought is destitute. It’s not always pleasant to have those conversations, but the alternative is it gets worse.

I was gonna say it’s so out of character I’d almost half assume he actually believes there to be grass there

Always used to pick Razer

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 a 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.

Okay that took me by surprise

I’ll be sharing this

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

With the careful application of a smoking wand, a camera tripod, some pipe cleaners and epoxy, you can practice both simultaneously

kill, and I swear to god if you’re still there when I ps, I’m getting out the -9

DONKkk vvvvvvvvvvrrrrrr click

Magnets mostly messed with tapes, floppies and hard disks. I believe you could also mess up a CRT’s calibration with one.

None of those technologies are particularly commonplace these days, especially not in those glasses.

I mean an MRI level magnet could crush them, but you’re gonna struggle to move that around

Oh, I guess I’m a stoneager with a penchant for functional elitism then.

Though I will admit OOP is valid for involved data modelling, everything else should be functional though.

I’ve also trained myself out of most short variable names for maintainability reasons

If it’s a Windows machine why overcomplicate it? Just use Samba/SMB/CIFS (File sharing in windows)

I’m pretty sure most file managers on F-Droid will do it

If you want automation, look into Syncthing

The non-can-only-be-used-to-refill-a-bottle kind of water fountains being as ubiquitous as they seem to be, seems to be a uniquely American thing.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in the UK since I was in school

Could be the other way, our brains nerfing the incredible flavour so we don’t all die of hyperhydration

If you do root cause analysis on most of society’s ills, you pretty much always eventually arrive at “the economic and political system we use, is actively harmful to the vast majority of people”

Literally I can’t think of a single big problem we’re facing where this isn’t the case.

I’ve never seen something so pointless that I’ve wanted more

I wish I still had time for advent of code…

Oh that’s cool to hear, I was under the impression in research that whilst a lot of the processing actually happens in FORTRAN-written code, it was nearly always reusing already-written functions and primitives in a higher level language (such as python, via the aforementioned SciPy). And then those libraries being maintained by a handful of wizards on the internet somewhere.

Can you elaborate on the kind of research where people are still actively writing directly in FORTRAN? Did people typically arrive with the skills already or was there training for learning how to write it well?