Hello everyone,
Thinking about this as the on-boarding experience on Lemmy can be subpar, especially because new joiners have to
- find a list of communities they could like (something like this post https://feddit.org/post/6554534, but should be there as a default)
- browse All and stumble upon all the news, political and tech that we know (https://lemmy.world/?dataType=Post&sort=TopDay)
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.
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.
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.
Not necessarily. Here is a discussion with a mod of sh.itjust.works who provided an alternate idea:
Edit: it still would not block actual users from those instances though - only defederation, PieFed, or the Sync or Connect Lemmy apps can do that.
Hasn’t a bot have to be developed? 😄
I never saw an announcement to that effect, though I don’t have an account on sh.itjust.works. Elsewhere in that thread other admins voiced strong support for Lemmy.ml so there may be quite strong push-back to such, even being easily reversible, even for strictly new accounts, even though it makes the issue opt-in rather than currently where the have to expend ENORMOUS efforts to opt-out. Also iirc the issue of site content warnings came up and took focus in the conversation to see how that might play out in the then-future.
People have been asking for such tools for 2 years now - here’s a post from ml itself asking for finer-grained controls. And another that said not yet, but given all the things they listed seems like it would say the opposite today (e.g. suppression of anti-ccp views appearing on ml, which I suspect was happening even back then too).
Despite that, no major instance has wanted to separate itself from ml. This is their software, apparently it’s their network too. We don’t even have a name for the part of the Fediverse that isn’t either Lemmy or the Threadiverse that would by definition include Meta’s Threads (Mbin and PieFed are too small, and Sublinks non-existent yet). And a Google search of the word Lemmy pulls up ml as the first instance hit.
Ofc if we’re changing that now, then I think that’s awesome.
Lemmy.cafe still has issues with the pictures. I suggested the admin to reach out to another admin, let’s see how it goes: https://lemmy.cafe/post/9986198/9302079
Maybe discuss.online could consider it? You started the thread about hexbear a few months ago, and it was positively received by the community.
It might do a post on !fediverse@lemmy.world to discuss that. It would indeed be better to have a term to call Lemmy/Piefed/Mbin, having to list them all each time get old quite fast.
For me it’s the musician first. “lemmy instance” shows Lemmy.world as the first instance, after https://join-lemmy.org/instances, reddit threads and the Wikipedia page
I made such a post, but ironically federation issues prevented the vast majority of people from seeing it (except those I sent explicit links to as part of other ongoing conversations) until several days later, at which point it got buried in the past posts and wouldn’t have shown up even in New.
And that experience convinced me that essentially this is Lemmy. The apps are not always such, and PieFed and Mbin are like the apps: they work to communicate with “Lemmy”. Content is hosted at places like !tenforward@lemmy.world, which is “Lemmy”, even if you access it from Mbin.
It will not always be this way, especially if Lemmy.World switches to Sublinks (or PieFed?), but it is now. I still would like to use a more inclusive term, but I am not sure what it should be.
Ah yes, I remember. That was unfortunate indeed. I might just repost your post to get a new discussion rolling 😄