this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2025
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Fedigrow

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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 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (4 children)

Me liking printed books more than ebooks is already a political matter, so... that would be difficult to offer political-free content.

I think I already mentioned it, but my idea would be to have nothing for newcomers (so they don't get to see even a single political, or low effort post) beside a few tags/keywords/categories they could click in order to start having content displayed in their feed that they actually want to see, no matter how good or how bad it would be ;)

edit: typos

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I would counter and suggest that Lemmy implements a "default block" system that admins can set on their instance, i.e. the 3 you've mentioned, plus any others they want. When the account is created, the default blocks are applied (either instance or communities or ideally flexibility to add both).

Users can then choose to unblock these if they want to engage with that content without moving instance.

While portability is kind of a feature of the lemmyverse, your posts don't come with you so likely people wouldn't want to move off the "default" instance, which would create another problem with centralized instances.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (7 children)

I would counter and suggest that Lemmy implements a “default block” system that admins can set on their instance, i.e. the 3 you’ve mentioned, plus any others they want. When the account is created, the default blocks are applied (either instance or communities or ideally flexibility to add both).

The issue is that requires development on Lemmy. The proposal in the OP can be done with the existing tools. Otherwise, I agree with you, what would be more elegant.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (5 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (5 children)

Hello,

Thank you for your comment and proposal.

The potential issue with the approach you suggest is that once people leave the onboarding instance for another one, their feed is now filled with all the depressive posts we know are usually the most upvoted/discussed. Some might want to stay in the onboarding instance forever. Heck,, even I wouldn't mind having one of my alts there and just enjoy chill content.

I agree with the person yhat said subscribed isn’t that useful, i’ve found that as well.

That's interesting. It probably goes back to your aussie.zone being country-based. I have the same feeling on country instances, while general instances Local feed then to be too heterogeneous to be interesting.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (6 children)

There are significant logistical hurdles to a dedicated onboarding-only site. For instance, who is going to run and pay for it? And why? What's really tying them to the site? What's driving that commitment?

With other sites -- even large, general purpose ones -- there is this sense that you are building a community. That you're doing this for the people who rely upon you and your work. And there's the hope that those people will stick around and contribute, either as moderators, or as funders, to help keep the lights on, and keep the space hygienic. But if the whole purpose of the space is for people to GTFO and find their "real" site... who are they doing this for? Why? And what are they getting out of it?

To set up and operate this is to get excited about being the cog in someone else's machine. Most of us are already cogs in someone else's machines, professionally. We're not going to want to do it as a hobby, too.

And for funding, if the whole purpose is for people to leave, they're not not going to pay you for being a temporary sandbox.

These are centralized, business-type solutions. This is not a centralized space. There is no umbrella corporation backing all of this. Loss leaders are not a solution. Asking someone to be the sacrificial lamb for the network is not reasonable.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

All very good points, which is why I think the political free instance shouldn't be temporary. People should be able to consider it their long term home.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Why can't we have onboarding information on https://join-lemmy.org/?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Mostly because this website is managed by the Lemmy devs, and what I'm suggesting is basically an instance without lemmy.ml, their instance

And I hope it doesn't come too disrespectful towards their work, I think Lemmy as a software is a quite good Reddit replacement (the best we have so far, actually), but I also think we could benefit from an instant with less political content.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I wonder if we could maybe try to get it in one of these places? I swear there were other guide sites I had saved but I lost them when my kbin.social account died.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Not sure how useful that would be as join-lemmy will probably stay above in terms of SEO.

We could imagine a one page website with an introduction and the core concepts of Lemmy, but that would require some UI work to make it appealing

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (7 children)

@[email protected] as I know you like the topic

@[email protected] as we discussed it just now

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

discuss.online would be a good candidate, but you'd want to get buy-in from @[email protected] as well

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I was thinking about it, but I'm not sure Jgrim would like to completely remove all news and political communities.

The issue here is that this instance would have to accept to not federate those communities, which can definitely be an issue for a generalist instance.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I agree, plus, people can block politics if they want already. Perhaps help improve onboarding documentation would help more than a kiddie pool instance. That does sound nice though. Perhaps a new instance that’s a subdomain of discuss.online or a new domain.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (4 children)

improve onboarding documentation

The issue is to get the documentation to the new joiners. There are quite a few insightful posts on [email protected] , but the new joiners don't have any way to know that's where they should go

kiddie pool

I see it more like a chill garden instance, but kiddie pool works too I guess 😄

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