Right now, unless someone is linked to an instance directly, the first point of entry is usually join-lemmy.org, and let’s face it, it’s completely uninviting.
The first few screenshots give off a Rust nerd vibe, and you have a “join a server” button shown to you before you even get to see some short explanation of how the Fediverse works.
In contrast, https://matrix.org/ and https://joinmastodon.org/ (which btw also has this “join a server” shown too early problem, but they kind of go around it by linking a default instance) feel much more welcoming.
Maybe we could have a contest to make join-lemmy.org better? Not just the layout, the wording is also way too technical for the most part and deserves to be reviewed by people with more of a marketing mindset.
We could also have a similar one to make a short introductory video, like what was done by Framasoft (a French non-profit) in this video: https://peertube.fr/w/9dRFC6Ya11NCVeYKn8ZhiD (or probably just reuse that video if there’s not enough interest in making a similar Lemmy-focused one?)
Would be really cool to have creative people contribute that way to Lemmy without necessarily coding!
It's being rebuilt already
Only the theme is being changed: https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/pull/243#issuecomment-1733895034
That's one issue. There's more in the to-do posted 2 weeks ago.