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 1 day 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] 3 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Not really, you would just need a community that's focused on posting starter packs, and for people advertising Lemmy to others to direct people to that starter pack community when checking out Lemmy. There are things that could be developed to help make starter packs more useful, but it could start off as simply as just people making posts with lists of communities that people interested in crocheting or whatever should go check out.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

We already have [email protected] that is supposed to fill another issue (discoverability of communities), and every week someone asks "how can I discover communities" on !asklemmy, someone points !newcommunities to them, and they say they weren't aware of it.

It's even in the rotating instances messages of Lemmy.world, but still.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Some interesting facts:

  • the release date of 0.19.3 was 2024-01-24
  • also one year ago, when Lemmy.World defederated from Lemmygrad.ml, they said "Due to the severity of the posts and comments, we are not waiting for the next Lemmy update that will allow users to block instances."
  • two years ago this post also mentions "Unlike Mastodon, Lemmy does not provide a feature for individual users to block an instance (yet). This creates a dilemma where we must either defederate [or]..."

Fast-forward to today, and Lemmy still does not offer the ability to block users from an instance. Or for reports to federate to moderators on remote instances. The pace of development is quite slow, and shows little signs of speeding up. Furthermore, why would those same admins of lemmy.ml be in favor of sharing the same power that they wield on that instance with everyone using this software?

Rust is not a language conducive to making many changes to the codebase. I predict that one year from now there will be little change in the Lemmy software, with people still begging for features that they hoped for two years ago already. To be clear it's not the fault of the developers, but of people having too high expectations and hopes.

So yeah, the OP idea is a good one, but I'll cover that separately and here just wanted to say that the slow pace of new features is by design of the language used, and people must simply get used to that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago

Furthermore, why would those same admins of lemmy.ml be in favor of sharing the same power that they wield on that instance with everyone using this software?

I'm not too sure. If tomorrow someone came up with a pull request to add that feature, the devs would have to accept it, or publicly admit they actively reject that feature, which would probably create a platform wide drama