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] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Honestly might be a good idea, but easily corruptible.

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

Thank you for your feedback

[–] [email protected] -4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Hide the reality of this place so new users can be duped into engaging with great minds like universalmonk or yogthos?

Are you kidding me?

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

Tankie spotted.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

It's the opposite, those two would probably be banned from the instance

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The onboarding issue isn't politics or which instances are federated, it's that federations exist for all to see when it's something that should impact the server side only and users should come to Lemmy and feel like they're joining just any other centralized website.

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

they’re joining just any other centralized website.

That's not the case. Users have to attach themselves to an instance or another, and the content they will be able to see will change accordingly. That's how ActivityPub works

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

I know that's not the case, I'm saying that's much more of an issue when it comes to onboarding than anything else that was mentioned in the OP.

Instances will be what keeps Lemmy from ever becoming a true Reddit alternative.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I realize that a lot of people have a strong dislike of politics, but you wouldn't see so much political discussion if there wasn't an equally large number of people who engage in it. I think most people on Lemmy are probably reading the all feed rather than just local anyway, so one instance not allowing political communities wouldn't really do much. Politics aren't really limited to specific instances so defederating wouldn't really help.

Learn to use your blocklists instead. Block communities, instances, and individuals that you don't want to see. For whatever reason I find myself blocking far more individuals on Lemmy than I ever did on Reddit, perhaps because there are a higher percentage of people with extremist views on various topics here.

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

Learn to use your blocklists instead. Block communities, instances, and individuals that you don’t want to see.

Everyone already here does that. We're currently 42k monthly active users. If we want to have more niche communities (a complain usually expressed towards the platform), we have to find a way to make it easier to join without having to figure out from the get go how to block what is probably at least 50% of the content here.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

People have to be willing to start those niche communities and slog it out alone for a bit.

Speaking as [email protected] mod. Otome games don't strictly have to be visual novels but most are, so practically it's a subgenre of an already niche video game genre. Got a few subscribers and posters/commenters. Not nearly as big as Reddit's 100,000ish, but still something. There are more on Mastodon, which I super appreciate the muting and blocking features of.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

I recently discussed with @[email protected] about [email protected] (Age of Mythology)

I guess in your case being about a genre rather than a specific game helps

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I mean the solution if you don't want to see a common topic on /c/all or whatever we call it on Lemmy is to subscribe to specific communities and just read those. But I don't think Lemmy is really big enough for that yet. I think if you did that you would very quickly notice that you're just seeing the same threads popping up on your feed (individual threads seem to stay active for much longer on Lemmy than on Reddit, owing to less overall content). So I just don't see any obvious path to provide what you're asking. A list of "default communities" like reddit used to have? There's reasons why reddit killed that off, mainly because no one could agree on which communities should or shouldn't be on the list. Individually curated "starter packs" like Bluesky is doing? I dunno you probably could do something like that with the import settings functionality.* I mean the solution if you don't want to see a common topic on /c/all or whatever we call it on Lemmy is to subscribe to specific communities and just read those. But I don't think Lemmy is really big enough for that yet. I think if you did that you would very quickly notice that you're just seeing the same threads popping up on your feed (individual threads seem to stay active for much longer on Lemmy than on Reddit, owing to less overall content). So I just don't see any obvious path to provide what you're asking. A list of "default communities" like reddit used to have? There's reasons why reddit killed that off, mainly because no one could agree on which communities should or shouldn't be on the list. Individually curated "starter packs" like Bluesky is doing? I dunno you probably could do something like that with the import settings functionality. Edit: Perhaps individual instances could have their own lists of default communities. It would give a bit more flavor to which instance you choose. I don't know if current Lemmy codebase would support this, though.

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

Individually curated “starter packs” like Bluesky is doing?

Yes, that's the idea. As an example from the OP: https://feddit.org/post/6554534

I don’t know if current Lemmy codebase would support this, though.

Negative, that would be a hack, like a pinned post on the new joiners instance or something similar.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I feel like the intent of this post is obvious. Whether you personally believe it's a good idea or not is one thing; but there seem to be quite a lot of people responding to "let's avoid politics!" with "everything is political". It frustrates me.

Yes, I understand and agree with the fact that every small little action is informed by unpleasantly political realities like our demographics, our own explicitly political beliefs, who it affects negatively, who it benefits, etc. But if I ask "hey, is this instance full of politics?" I think it's quite obvious I want to avoid a feed full of depressing news, threads about how [political candidate] and their supporters are being awful today (even if I agree). That even if my feed full of anime and cute animals and whatever else is still political (by my choice to avoid politics, ability to do so, the fact cute animals are prioritized for how they look while other important animals get less attention, by anime being Japanese and reflecting their culture and views, etc.), it's not really quite the same kind of political as what you would see in Politics or WorldNews or the like. I feel as if people are pointing out an unhelpful and depressing technical reality that runs counter to what I feel is the obvious intent.

I don't want to come in and assert that the posts I don't like must so obviously be made in bad faith, and would like to understand the intent behind these posts. Especially since to me they read less as "hey, you might want to consider this small little choice actually has effects… how everything can be political," a friendly informational statement, and more as "let us set up a community free of politics—BUT EVERYTHING IS POLITICS GOTCHA."

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

“everything is political”

You can see someone below telling me [email protected] is political. And it may be, but as you said, that's not the same type of politics we see in Politics or World News.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

A political-free space is an inherently political space.

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