The instance list has a couple of recommended sites at the top. They are defined in this file and seperated by language. For most languages there is only one recommendation or none at all, so you can simply add yours by making a pull request.
In case of English, the situation is a bit different. The current recommended instances (beehaw.org and sopuli.xyz) are already quite large and would be shown near the top of the list anyway. So it makes sense to recommend smaller instances instead.
To be recommended, an instance should meet these requirements:
- It should be a general purpose instance
- At least one member of the admin team needs to be in the Instance admin chat to coordinate with other admins
- The admin team needs to be prepared for a large influx of users, both in terms of hardware and moderation
We can use this thread to discuss which instances should be recommended. There is no maximum number of recommendations, but it should be an even number to work with the desktop layout.
On a side note, the instance list itself could use many improvements such as showing more details about instances or using different sorting methods. If you are a programmer or web designer, you can contribute to improve the website.
Edit: If you are a Lemmy admin and want your instance to be recommended, go ahead and open a pull request for this file. Developers can also contribute in the same repo to improve join-lemmy.org.
I don't agree that there should be strictures that enforce similarity to Reddit on instances if they want to be recommended. You've apparently been using Lemmy for three days now, based on your git repo history and your top-level comment in this thread. As a longtime Lemmy user, allow me to point out that Lemmy is not, and should not seek to be, exactly like Reddit. To enforce that would be to stifle potential avenues of improvement (like, as I've mentioned, removing downvotes).
Also, growth for growth's sake is not something I think should be sought after; your policies seem to be entirely focused on growth with no concern for quality or community, which I don't agree with.
Honestly I'm not sure I'll stick to lemmy if the amount of content doesn't grow. And I'm sure I'm not alone. I'm here for news, and there's very little coverage of world events on lemmy (though that has already noticeably improved as our userbase grows).
I do want lemmy to grow, but not for growth's sake. I want it to grow so the content (news article submissions and quality comments about those articles) grows.
If you're a liberal, as most Redditors are, you probably won't like it much, but Hexbear.net is far more active, and has plenty of news posted. (Keep in mind that "liberal" here covers all of the US political spectrum that doesn't qualify as fascist; i.e. moderate republicans are liberals too. Hexbear is a communist instance.) It's not mentioned on join-lemmy yet because it's a fork, but there are efforts ongoing to merge back to upstream so federation is possible (one of the main roadblocks is the much-higher volume of activity, which is uncovering bugs that don't show up under lighter loads).
I hope to see that beautiful theme on Lemmy <3