this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2025
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Fedigrow

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Idea: having a political-free instance for new joiners (feddit.org)
submitted 17 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Hello everyone,

Thinking about this as the on-boarding experience on Lemmy can be subpar, especially because new joiners have to

In order to avoid this, what would you think of having a "new joiners" instance, where

  • hexbear, lemmygrad and ml would be defederated
  • politics and news communities would be blocked at the instance level

That could help to onboard people, so that the first time they look around, they see more gardening, cute comics and casual conversation rather than another set of depressing memes.

Disclaimer: politics and societal issues are important and should be discussed extensively (they are quite popular on Lemmy, let's be honest). I'm not advocating to hide them all, just to not show them as the first content people potentially interested in Lemmy would see.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

My instance already blocks hex, grad, and ml, so I'm halfway there lol.

The politics/news communities here, though, are present but highly curated since many of them do not meet our standards for preventing misinformation. Seriously, our rules are very strict after I first got started with Lemmy and saw what a complete shit show worldnews at .ml was.

Defederating from the big 3 "extreme" instances is one thing and very doable. The problem with running a dedicated "no news/politics" instance would be preventing users from subscribing to any. The admin would have to on top of every news community that shows up and then administratively remove/hide those. That's going to be a chore.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

The admin would have to on top of every news community that shows up and then administratively remove/hide those. That’s going to be a chore.

Yes, and that brings another concept that Bluesky has and that we could use: crowdsourced blocklists. That way people can just add to the blocklist, and it gets blocked for everyone subscribing to that list.

In our case it would be done instance-level (we would need some hack so that other people can add to the communities blocklist of the instance) but the end result would be the same.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

For what it's worth on the newer versions of Lemmy with the ability to import settings files, you can create and share json files of blocked instances/communities without overwriting other user settings. Not as streamlined as what you're describing, but it's an option given current circumstances.

E.g.
blocklist.json
{"blocked_communities":["https://lemmy.site/c/meh","https://lemmy.site/c/mehbutmoremeh"],"blocked_instances":["unpleasantlemmy.site","lemming.mean"]}

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Oh, interesting! Would that overwrite the currently blocked communities, or could this be reused on a regular basis?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

[...] you can create and share json files of blocked instances/communities without overwriting other user settings

I finally got around to testing this and found that it doesn't overwrite existing blocks, merely adds them to your existing list. I made sure that the import file only contained new blocks and not duplicates to verify. You have to refresh the page to see the changes, and may take a few seconds depending on list length/instance performance, but it works.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 hours ago

Very interesting, thanks!