Hello everyone!
I recently posted about asking third party devs switch APIs from reddit to lemmy on the open source community here. As we know, lemmy should obviously be seeing a lot of new users join, and I have some humble suggestions to the developers of Lemmy @nutomic@lemmy.ml, @dessalines@lemmy.ml and the other devs.
Just like Mastodon did, can we redesign the homepage to appear more user friendly welcoming? Don't get me wrong, not that the current homepage is bad or so, but it appears to look tech nerdy for the average user, a constant feedback I've been getting on my recent posts promoting Lemmy at Reddit.
Here are some improvements in my mind:
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Change background in lemmy's website to be plain colour, and increase the explanations' font size as well as more explanations, like what a server is in the server page, add some lemmy style modern icons next to the explanations. (example: Lemmy is open source, so throw an icon that represents open source). Right now for the average user, the homepage might seem a little overwhelming due to lots of text going on, like Mastodon's new design, make the explanations appear bigger and give some space between them, even if it means more scrolling.
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Make and link an "API" page on the homepage, like we have for "join, news, app, donate and etc" saying "welcoming third-party developers" and explaining how Lemmy is open source and how API will remain freely accessible forever. This page should also consist information and links to API, helping devs migrate from reddit to Lemmy or even start making their first third-party app from scratch. At the moment I even got some comments from my other posts regarding Lemmy on reddit, and people are asking where is Lemmy's API or they are unaware of an API, it's not as visible. So we need an API page.
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Remove Remmel as iOS app and replace it since it's no longer developed, a common question on reddit as people don't realize it's abandoned.
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Provide some explanation as to how web apps can be added on platforms like iOS (and android, etc), especially since we lack a stable iOS app right now.
If you have anymore, please feel free to shoot a comment below guys! I will add em here :)
Some screen reader accessibility work would not go amiss. For example next to the username to sublemmy is a little dot talkback reads as "two of five" then the next thing reads "5h three of five" but does not tell me that it was edited at that time. Next is another dot that is read as "four of five" and finally there is a book icon that just reads as "button". To the right of the number of comments the upvote button is only read as " link" while the downvote button is read correctly. The fediverse icon in replies and the chain icon to the left are also only read as "link"