gcrk Thats by design.
This is just my opinion based on some assumptions that might be wrong (I am NOT ranting 😃):
If I am researching for some services I might want to self host, I tend to look at the UI a lot. One of the key factors for me are functionality and nice user experience. Firstly I open up a github/gitlab page and second thing is I check if the service has a website in the readme to see the screenshots of the product. I think that many people are looking at it like me or even more extremely.
Having only one image of the app on a promotional page defeats the whole purpose in my opinion. What we should want to do with this webpage is actually to 'sell' the product. How would we do it without showing it off?
When I am comparing fastify vs express or bun vs node, sure, I look at the text in search of how easy would it be to adapt to these tools or what's the performance comparison between them. I can also look at the React's tsx vs Vue's SFC and compare how much nicer one or the other seems to me. But I do it as a developer - with a mindset that I know that I need to dig through a lot of text to make the correct decision.
If I'm comparing applications/services for my daily/personal use - I look not only at the core functionality that I am looking for but also on the UI/UX. I am now a customer. I do not want to read a lot of tech stuff to be honest. I just want a working product that looks nice. A great example here are an android launcher apps. I've dug through pretty much every single one on F-droid. First I've tried those that were aesthetically pleasing for me just by looking at the screenshots. I haven't even considered ones that were without them and besides the fact that my main requirement was to be able to hide the stock apps I do not use, I've decided to use an app that doesn't have this functionality but is the most user friendly for me. By now I've tried pretty much most of the launchers available on F-droid and I couldn't find one that would suit my every need and be user friendly enough. However I saw some correlation: The apps that didn't have any screenshots, were either incomplete, ugly or lacking a lot of functionality; Apps with screenshots were mostly okay; Apps with full blown screenshots that look like they've been designed by marketing team had most functionality/were the nicest to use.
My point is that I think that this desing decision is not a good one. We should be pround of our product and as I've said earlier, we should try to 'sell' it to the possible customer. I do not like social media at all and I am not following our activity on such platforms (only our blog) but I understand that this is a great channel for advertising our software. Imagine promoting funkwhale only by writing about its features. I don't think that there would be a lot of people who'd be convinced to our product. Then think if the outcome would be the same if we'd also post screenshots/videos of the app or its features. I think that in these times, people are more attracted to the screenshots/videos rather than text. Especially if they're consumers and not developers.
Who is the target audience for the website? Developers or the consumers? I think that the latter. Gitlab and documentation are already pages that are targeting developers. Why create yet another website that targets the same group? Sure, we need more developers but I also think that we need more users. The main website of the project should target them. Developers would scroll all the way down to find a link to the git repository without problems.
Also: typo.
[upl-image-preview url=https://forum.funkwhale.audio/assets/files/2023-03-13/1678745621-224375-image.png]
