UX Discussion: Feeds and subscriptions on the home page

[mykdavies]

I'm just thinking how we should manage the feeds on the home page, especially for those new to Lemmy. This proposes ideas, but is meant for discussion at the moment so please don't write any solutions based on this until we decide on a way forward!

I love that when you open the app, there's already content, but showing new users everything leads to confusion. Making the "EVERYTHING" feed an option has helped a little, but there's still a way to go.

I suggest that when a user has no accounts set up we default the home page to only showing "local" content on the first available instance on the accounts page (ie largest). That way they will see a lot of content, but minimise risk of seeing questionable posts or getting overwhelmed with 0-comment reposts from the lemmit instance.

Some users may never choose to do anything more than read that feed and the comments. And that is just fine.

Anyone who does try to vote or reply will get the message that they're not logged in to that instance with an option to log in which takes them to the Accounts page.

This page should do a better job of explaining what they are being asked to do here (including the difficult job of discussing what instances are and why this is important). This page should be kept up to date with three large, well-managed instances so new users don't end on an instance running on a poorly admined instance.

It's probably worth adding a link to join-lemmy.org for people who are comfortable going off the beaten path. We could even look for a way of integrating join-lemmy.org functionality to allow them to review and pick a suitable instances, but it may well be that the only people who would ever take that route would be okay with actually just typing in the instance name again.

Once people are on this page they should be able to set each server as inactive so while it remains on the screen they don't currently see reference to it on any other screen (maybe using the heart metaphor as in the next paragraph), or to remove it completely (but we should require a minimum of one instance).

Adding subscriptions doesn't feel like a natural or obvious next step. I'm wondering if we should add something like a heart icon next to the comments count on each post that allows a user to subscribe to that community direct from that post and shows as full/empty to indicate if you are subscribed or not.

This is just me thinking out loud, so I'd love to hear your reactions and ideas!