Fedigrow

A political-free space is an inherently political space.

I've tried to read through and understand all the comments. I have certainly failed in doing that, so bear with me if this has already been covered.

Can't we spin up an 'onboarding' instance? Where Local is focused on helping new people navigate and understand this stuff with focused communities to navigate Lemmy, understand Fediverse, Choose Instance, even communities run by adjacent fediverse participants like piefed, mastodon, peertube etc.

The instance could have a clear onboarding mission, with an expectation that as users become acclimatised they will move off to start trying a 'home' server. Their account could be activated only for a period of time on that server.

The delineation between Local, subsrcibed and All can be leveraged here to provide a safe harbour with active mods ready to guide, while allowing Lemmy Full Blast on All, so people understand the reality of Lemmy.

This would also provide an experience a lot like the experience i generally have with Lemmy, AZ is cool, sometimes a little sleepy but rarely any real issues or drama. When i'm up for it, i venture onto All, but its easy to deal with because i know i can just switch back to Local whenever i want. I imagine this is what its like for most users on medium to smaller instances.

I agree with the person yhat said subscribed isn't that useful, i've found that as well. Maybe thats poor subscriptions by myself to blame for that though.

"default subreddits" worked well for Reddit as it was growing, I would expect it to work here as well if curated well.

Granted, it did not work out well for atheism, which was a default sub and wreaked havoc on the cultural implications of openly identifying as an atheist.

Maybe keep religion out of it this time.

I think that having a "newcomers" instance is a great idea. The main things that need to be ironed out are:

(1) The limits of what is/isn't allowed within that instance. Instead of focusing on what is/isn't political, let's focus on what shuns your typical user away:

• anything government-related. Presidents and wars and public policies and political parties and... you get it.
• content that TL;DR to "GAFAM/Musk/Meta/OpenAI are fucking everything up".
• content that makes people soapbox.
• content that makes you say "humankind is fucked up".

(2) Behaviour rules. I feel like people saying "eeew Lemmy is nasty" don't do that just because of the content here, but also because of how users behave.

(3) If users should be encouraged to migrate to other instances once they feel comfortable with the Fediverse.

Additionally: we need multi-communities ("mutireddits") or something similar. Having a list of communities that you can link once, and get other people to follow, would be a godsend.

I think that's a good idea. We already have lots of news, world news and articles about politics here. And I always like to see this platform being used for other kinds of conversation. And not just the link aggregator part of it.

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

I could see the first point being almost the default for topic-specific instances (along with not allowing NSFW material). Who wants to join a D&D, MTG, Star Wars, instance only to run headfirst into a Stalinist troll? With the caveat that I don't see them that much unless Russia gets a mention in [email protected].

I am unsure if the latter is needed - give people the option to subscribe or block politics, shitposts and memes. Perhaps start with the default to "Local" and have an introduction thread about it. However, I may be a statistical outlier as I default to "Local" and rarely use "All" and so don't run into things I am not signed up for.

Unfortunately everything is inherently political, but I can see the value of an instance that favors mainstream low controversial content.

I think there are two issues:

1. It sure would be nice if there were some "choose my experience" features at a broader scale than individually taking responsibility for blocking all the noisy instances and noisy people, for whatever your personal definition of noise is. A checkbox like "hide political content" or "downplay political content", and then similar checkboxes for meme content, content for a particular geographical region, popular media and entertainment, and so on, would be an absolutely wonderful thing. I think PieFed has something somewhat similar to this but it's at about 10% of where it could be. I think Lemmy inherited Reddit's "you can either have the default or else invest a huge amount of time into customizing" model, but it doesn't need to. We should have a lot more rich ways of deciding what the algorithm and experience is going to be than just a massive array of individual "yes" or "no" buttons.
2. Some of why your suggestion would be nice is cultural, not technical. People seem like they like to have their "home" instance where they can kind of make friends and read content from like-minded people, irrespective of how whatever algorithm is tuned. Personally I love political content and news, but I could see an instance that just turns it all off for people who aren't into it being a rare island of wholesome interactions on Lemmy, simply because of the types of people who would choose to go there. We can go back to watching the world falling down around us some other time.