GitHub and GitLab both support inserting images into your README.md. Here’s the syntax:
![Description of the image](https://path/to/image)
As a user, I completely agree. People often make decisions in a few seconds, and you’ve done all this work developing an app. That little extra step will allow you to make a difference to more people!
As a developer of a Lemmy web UI, I’ve been thinking about adding screenshots to my README for weeks but still haven’t done so 🙈
The SvelteKit + TypeScript combo is such a breeze to work with!
And compared to other languages, JavaScript scores pretty well in performance benchmarks. It has a lot more going for it than people give it credit for.
Heck yeah, share your work with the world.
We should probably compile a regularly updated list somewhere. It’s great that people have so many options. Now we just need to make it easier for them to find a web UI that suits their needs.
Maybe a frontend or app that just shows you everything and allows you to interact easily without worrying about logins or urls for instances, and pushes the federation aspect “behind the scenes”.
Let’s say I’m browsing Lemmy.world through this frontend and I stumbled upon !privacy@lemmy.ml. Would the following be clear?
It’s a just rhetorical device to explain a theory for why most Redditors haven’t jumped ship yet. It may be correct, it may be incorrect.
If it was that easy to convince Redditors, we’d already have a very diverse userbase. But by all means, keep spreading the word. We all want Lemmy to succeed.
In all honesty, as much as I want non-profit Reddit alternatives to succeed, I think Lemmy is a tough sell to Redditors. Here’s roughly how I think that’d go.
Lemmy user: “You should try Lemmy”
Redditor: “Sure, what’s its website?”
Lemmy user: “There are many”
Redditor: “Wait what”
Lemmy user: “You have to pick one”
Redditor: “Why?”
Lemmy user: “See, Lemmy is not a website, but a network of federated instan-”
Redditor: “That sounds complicated. I just want a website like Reddit”
Lemmy user: “But don’t you care about how Reddit has treated its mods, app devs and the general community?”
Redditor: “Yeah but all this Lemmy and Kbin stuff is confusing. Can I just use a website without reading up on all this Fediverse stuff?”
Lemmy user: “Okay, just go to Lemmy.world”
Redditor: “It seems to be down”
Lemmy user: “Hmm, maybe try Lemmy.ml?”
Redditor: “This website looks a little… hard to wrap my head around”
Lemmy user: “There are alternative frontends”
Redditor: “What now?”
Lemmy user: “Do you know about Alexandrite?”
Redditor: “Nevermind, I’m out”
If we want to convince a wide range of users to use Lemmy, we have to make using Lemmy a no-brainer for everyone.
I’m trying to contribute by building a new opensource web UI that I hope will provide a better UX for the average Redditor. It’s not ready to become a daily driver yet, but I’m hoping to get to a point where it’s nice enough that instances will want to host it on their domain. Maybe I’m delusional in thinking this web UI will appeal to users that don’t like the current ones. But there’s only one way to find out, and that is to build it.
Joking aside, I’m already donating the labor involved to create an alternative web UI. That’s as far as I’m willing to go for this project.