Imagine the following:
- Servers declare a target number of users/posts-per-day (enables programmatically detecting when other people’s servers are generally under/over capacity)
- Severs have a recommender list of other servers (whitelist), separate and more exclusive than their non-blocked list
Whenever someone goes to the sign up page, for example, on Lemmy.world, we:
- look at the recommender list
- find the server that is most under capacity
- have a very large iframe with “Sign up for Lemmy (using [under capacity server here])”
- have a small “No, I want to sign up specifically on Lemmy.world” option
AND, as a precaution against maybe-malicious takeovers (e.g. a Facebook server saying it has unlimited capacity and all new users getting forwarded to them) a server can set it’s own maximum recommender caps; e.g. “recommended” servers won’t be recommended if they’re above 10,000 users even if they claim they could handle more.
Thoughts?
I haven’t tested with 0.18.3 to see if new features were added to front-end lemmy-ui, but based on my experience with earlier 0.18 releases… the “Sign Up” page of Lemmy needs to have a custom message added for each instance basically introducing the instance from the admins. The experience is pretty bad… on my instance I have registration closed and lemmy-ui still just presents “Sign Up” links and even the form. I think it’s pretty important to get this in the back-end now so that the evolving independent front-ends all support the custom message shown above/below the Sign Up form…
Seems like something that shouldn’t take a lot of coding to get added (admin screen has place to create custom messages like “Legal”) that would be a good lemmy network-wide focus on the newcomer experience.