this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2025
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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] 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Maybe the above difference we have in our user experiences is why from my perspective this looks like it’ll work, and why it doesn’t look like it from your perspective.

I have an alt on a country instance, so I can compare, it's vastly different.

  1. An as yet unavailable technical fix to allow users to block instances,

People can block those in their settings now. What we don't have is a way to define a default blocklist applicable to all new users. A way to achieve the same result is either hiding (see the other post on this topic in the same community) or blocking those communities, but that has to be done by the admin.

  1. by having a strong Local to fall back away from All/Subscribed into.

The issue with the strong Local feed is that it's unrealistic to migrate all the "chill" communities listed on https://feddit.org/post/6554534 on the new instance, and it's also unrealistic to expect the Local feed to be as active as those communities. Lemmy is small, [email protected] and [email protected] are good where they are, nobody is going to replicate all of their content to the new instance local feed.

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

  1. Yeah, i shouldn't have waded into the technical stuff, i knew i'd get it mixed up! My bad!

  2. I would never dream of migrations like that. Theres lots of doubling of Communities on Lemmy. Its, for the most part, been quite a healthy thing to have multiple communities on the same or very similar topics.

Some haven't worked and are dead while others thrive, it provides an outlet for disagreements with overzealous mods, sometimes the minute differences in the worldnews commujities really makes a difference in the types of posts on each of them.

The above aside, So the idea i'm suggesting is strictly onboarding topics on the Local. Meaning the Local for anyone who's been around a while could find the Local quite boring, that in itself acts as a nudge for new users to move when theyre ready.

So no c/funny, or c/movies, communities, as you say others have got good communities going on those topics already.

The onboarding topics would include things like c/Choose a Home Instance, c/What is Fediverse, c/What is Lemmy, c/what the hell is Peertube, etc. Stuff like that, this is all of the top of my head so take the names for their vibe, not literally.

The 'onboarding only instance' matches your requirement of not being too political too quickly for newbies and avoids the questions of how far to go with whats defined as political. Because on the instance you will be deemed off topic if the comments aren't in relation to the new users setting themselves up on Lemmy. However, it has the added bonus of new users being able to go into All to see the real deal, then fall back into Local of they need context for something they've seen.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

So no c/funny, or c/movies, communities, as you say others have got good communities going on those topics already.

Now I understand more your vision.

However, it has the added bonus of new users being able to go into All to see the real deal

But then, there still needs to be some curation for the All feed, otherwise people will find the same depressing All feed we currently do, and just leave.