I started a discussion in the Fedibridge community about lowering the barriers to onboarding average users. In part of the discussion, someone pointed me to pangora.social/join as an example of a good onboarding page. I mentioned some shortcomings, and they suggested I post them here. So here I am. Slightly edited copy-paste follows. Just food for thought from someone who consults on UI/UX clarity:

(pangora.social/join) is not bad. But the graphics are immediately distracting, and if you don’t understand what they’re meant to symbolize, they’re just annoying. I still think a just a handful of general instances is a better idea because most people don’t think of social media a place they go for one or two interests, but a place they go for everything including those interests. Having said that, it’s a good flow…until you drill down far enough for it to become a cul-de-sac problem:

• Entertainment — OK, sounds good
• Movies & TV — so far so good

Been a couple months since my last update and theres been some announcements and me settling into the project I said I was merging Pangora into.

The project has been announced now with the name Sublinks and is currently being worked on by a bunch of devs and lemmy admins to make progress towards parity with lemmy quickly

Ive been working on UI design for Sublinks (attached image is an early version of the home page) bringing in aspects I worked on in Pangora and refining them

Will be posting updates over in [email protected] with my progress on the UI!

This community will be dead for awhile until sublinks reaches parity and the new version of Pangora is forked from it

Hey everyone! Got time to write up an update so figured I would update on events that have been happening around Pangora

Im going to be working on severely changing how the project is handled

Theres another project thats been getting made and rather than work on a separate thing than them ive decided to merge my work on pangora into their project

After that pangora will be soft forked (in both the front and back ends) for specific niche customizations but the majority of the development will be done in that other projects repository

They havent announced it publicly so ill let them be the ones to do that but if youre interested in helping develop it (or if youre an admin of an instance) feel free to reach out and I can add you to a chat for it (main languages used are java, typescript (next.js), and go)

In other news for the project I made a couple supporting sites

• https://badges.pangora.social/ - used to generate badges to show instance community or user stats
• https://r

Thanks for all the effort so far!

Doing some testing with animations for the site

All pages have a little fade in effect with the content by default when switched to to ease the transition a bit

The donation page I also added some custom swipe in effects to

Will eventually be adding handling for prefers-reduced-motion to disable the swipe in effects although not in currently

There may be some changes to how I organize the repos to rename Pangora-UI to pangora and the backend to something else

More info in the future though

Added a couple more buttons so you can see active communities from all connected instances as well

In addition youll see that the active users today is much larger values due to the site & community stats update I did in the instance where it now takes into account post and comment likes in addition to post and comment creations

(Note this and other updates wont be pushed out to the beta site likely until after 0.19 releases and the instance updates to it since ive been messing with the new authentication system)

Pushed an update to https://beta.pangora.social/ that has the changes ive made to the site since the last alpha

Updates include:

• Lists of active and new communities on the sidebar
• Community names can have custom gradients
• The post feeds works with javascript disabled
• The posts in the post feed now have less transparency and the background on the post previews have less transparency
• The post previews have been centered more
• The URL now changes to match the post when looking at a post preview
• A system theme has been added to the theme switcher and should be set by default
• The icons in the post feed scope & sort buttons now are not trapped inside the button
• The community view now allows you to sort posts
• You can now view posts from multiple communities
• code block text size has been made larger (might not work for comments)

Viewing posts from multiple communities

You can view posts from multiple communities at once by setting them all in the url. Separate e

Added in some sections on the right side of the screen in the home page that shows the 5 most active communities, and the 5 most recently made communities

This is essentially the equivalent of the trending communities section in lemmy-ui but isnt using the severely broken hot community sort

Section in lemmy ui below

Also you might notice that some communities now have different gradient colors. I added in support for different community gradients and set some values for some of them. (Note this is all hardcoded into the frontend current until I touch the backend).

It also affects the colors of the community names in post feeds such as is done below

As well I made the site sidebar card and the new community

I started implementing a feature that lets you see posts from multiple communities at the same time. Above ive got it pulling from 5 different communities.

Done by just listing all of the communities in the url with plus signs separating them. Its not pushed out to the pangora beta site right now but ill probably try to push out a build either this weekend or during the week

Currently just shows the first 50 from each, ill try to add some sort of addition to the backend in the future that will let me query for multiple communities so I can do the first 50 out of all of them so it doesnt have things out of order for the last post on a page and the first post on the next page

Hello everyone! I've pushed out a public alpha build to https://beta.pangora.social/ for people to start giving feedback on the design before it becomes more fleshed out

Feel free to check it out and say what you like or dont like in the comments here.

⚠ Warning: This is an alpha, things are still very unfinished. You cant use this as an alternative to lemmy-ui yet since things such as logging in aren't supported

⚠ Warning 2: If you attempt to use this on mobile currently it will be very broken

I constructed the UI by seeing what people liked from lemmy-ui, alexandrite, and photon and trying to match it up to how lemmy-ui is built so that it would be an easy switch between them

Main site mechanics that is different from lemmy-ui

• Comments from cross-posts show up when looking at a post (will be changed in the future to only communities that community has whitelisted to do it for once I mess around in the backend more)
• Comments and posts that have 0 or less score in t

Had some more free time to work on the pangora.social site so I pushed some support for the new fediseer tagging system so that it automatically populates instances in the instance selector.

Instances will populate in it if they:

• Have more than 50 members
• Are tagged with a tag for the site
• Are not censured by programming.dev or some other instances
• Can be found when the site checks for instances every day

A list of all tags that are used on the site can be seen at https://pangora.social/tags separated into categories.

I also pushed a little fix to the site so that if theres no instances in a category that category won't show up

Hey everyone! I'm back from doing things for Ludum Dare and am starting work back up on Pangora.

Spent a bit setting up a backend so I can start implementing some backend features such as flairs and started some progress on the admin settings in Pangora-UI

My current plan is to add two new features onto the backend and then clean up and add everything from lemmy-ui that hasnt been added already to get it ready to be publicly tested. After which will be aimed for a first release

Flairs

The first feature being added is going to be flairs which is the main thing that ive noticed has been lacking when interacting with lemmy.

Flairs are split up into four different types

• instance flairs
• community flairs
• post flairs
• user flairs

Instance Flairs

Instance flairs are flairs set on the instance/site level to show what kind of content your

Maybe this could be added to the sidebar?

Pushed an update to https://pangora.social/ to improve various aspects of the instance selector.

Instance Preview

Instead of directly sending someone to an instance it will instead show a preview of the instance so they can see info on it. Info includes:

• A description of the instance
• Name & Icon
• The site administrators (hovering over an avatar gives a popup with info on them)
• The instance uptime
• Where the instance is hosted
• The software and version used for the instance

Theres also a get another site button that pops up if theres more than 1 site for a certain category. When clicked it just gives another one in the category.

Category Shuffling

I changed around the locations of some of t

Hey Everyone! Back with another update on pangora. This week has had a little less progress in terms of pangora-ui and more setting up various other aspects.

Pangora now has a main site at https://pangora.social/. This will be used as the equivalent to join-lemmy.org and theres going to be a subdomain for testing out pangora-ui once it gets a bit more stable.

On the site currently theres some info about pangora and an instance selector for people to go through to find an instance they want to join. I made it so it sends people more often to what theyre interested in rather than a general purpose instance to help grow the niche instances more

Theres some misc pangora-ui changes but as theyre not big ill hold off on showing them off until the larger feature theyre part of is done

In addition I updated my remindme bot and moved it over to the pango

Hey everyone. back with a weekly progress update on pangora

Ive set up the Pangora-UI repo a bit more to make contributing to the project easier. Theres a contributing.md file where I walk through the different things the project uses and theres now issue templates for bug reports and feature requests so you can easily add one of the two here.

Theres now a functional log in page for the frontend and when logged in it replaces the log in and sign up buttons in the navbar with your profile picture (and when clicked opens up a dropdown)

Logging out works as well

For communities

Back with another update on Pangora-UI. Ive been working on adding the community list as well as making the entire thing semi-functional

Ive got some basic functionality in for most things and next up im going to be going through them one at a time and adding in all relevant features starting with the homepage.

I worked on the community list showing all communities in the instance, and all connected instances. This by default has the same information as lemmy-ui but you can toggle columns on and off to tailor it. (For example you can add a column for users/day, remove the comments column, etc.)

Communities will have badges on them if they fulfill certain conditions (top most condition here has priority)

• New (full star): Communities made in the last week
• New (half star): Communities made in the last month
• Active: The top 2.5% communities in

Back with another update on programming.dev's new frontend thats being built

Have a lot more progress done in terms of post content. Post views are almost done, just need to finish up some more aspects of the comments + add in mod options

New features since my last post

• Posts can now be viewed
• Comments are shown when looking at posts

• If a post has an image, you can click on the thumbnail to get a larger image popup

• Comments can be collapsed/expanded by clicking on the colored bar on the side (and are automatically collapsed if they have a score of 0 or below). Collapsed comments show the upvotes, the creator, and up to 100 characters of the content

![](https://lazysoci.al/api/v3/image_proxy?url=http

End of the second day of since ive started working on the pangora UI. Ive for the most part settled on a design and been going through cleaning it up and adding some functionality

Feel free to give some feedback on how you think it looks. The empty space on the right is going to have the trending communities and site information like the mockup I made here

Communities all have a blue purple gradient until I can get community colors into the backend to properly populate that like in my mockup

Things added since my last post:

• Hotkeys for all elements of the navbar to quickly choose one. (ex. you can hit x to switch to the communities tab without needing to touch your mouse)
• Popups when you hover over a button on the navbar for a bit explaining what the option is

![](https://lazysoci.al/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fprogramming.dev%2

Programming.dev has a soft fork of lemmy that is being developed so that we can focus on things that the instance needs (such as actual code blocks). This will still get changes made to lemmy but just have the new features on top of that. If a feature is general enough to be in lemmy itself we can try to get it pushed upstream.

Originally made this community a bit ago under a different name but after I was informed that the name was already in use brought it back up as Pangora! (hopefully no issues this time) A pangora is a type of moth and its also a combination of the words pangolin and pandora.

Im currently working on improving the instance UI in a repository named pangora-ui. No changes have been pushed yet as im stick mocking up designs with no functionality yet but ill be sharing some progress on that and on changes made to pangora in this community. Pangora-UI is a completely different project from lemmy-ui and its being built using Next.js with typescript, tailwind, NextUI, a