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.
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Would you guys quit shittin all over blaze? Not everything is politcal. The issue is people making everything political. How the fuck are cat memes and let’s say makeup, political? They’re not.
Some ppl just won’t shut the fuck up about politics and it’s super annoying. I think it’s a great idea blaze has.
Thanks!
If you removed political content from Lemmy there would be nothing left. All the other communities are dead.
They are not, as mentioned in the OP: https://feddit.org/post/6554534
20 active communities which are not politics, news, memes or tech
They are indeed drown in the political content, but that’s what this suggestion is trying to solve
There would be Linux, Garfield, Calvin & Hobbes, and soooo much anime. Why is there so much anime!?!
At least it’s all on one instance
Linux is semi-political, a most of the talk revolves around Foss in general not Linux itself
Anime would definitely have to be blocked for a good user experience
Sad but true
There’s no such thing as “politics-free”. Everything is political. Are you going to ban also comms about veganism? climate? LGBT? even gaming is political (just look at the cringelords of gamergate).
On top of that, you don’t know is the person who is interested in lemmy wants to join a “status-quo” instance like that or not. What if they were hoping to talk about some political subjects and now realize they cannot without making a new account? Bad experience.
There may be a point to be made about defaulting users to comms with less potential for flamewars, but that would require some sort of backend update.
Everything is political.
I tried to touch on that in the disclaimer at the end. I know that politics and societal issues are important and should be discussed extensively.
The issue we have now is that the All feed is overwhelmingly about serious and depressing topics. It’s a hard sell to get people to join a platform that just seems as negative as Reddit, but without even the niche communities to make up for it.
you don’t know is the person who is interested in lemmy wants to join a “status-quo” instance like that or not.
Indeed, so the plan would be to have something like
- join casualinstance.org is you want a casual experience
- join lemmy.dbzer0.com if you want an experience with politics and news
Similar to what I already with when I suggest both discuss.online and sopuli.xyz depending on the user location: https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1i0652l/for_the_love_of_everything_i_just_want_to_know/m6web7p/
I feel this functionality could be covered by this or this feature request. Basically if your instance admin has hesitated instances, new users shouldn’t see them. Likewise if they have trusted instances, they could serve as the first view for new accounts. These could provide a 3-tier system for new accounts according to their appetite for conflict. 1 only trusted. 2 trusted and non-hesitated. 3 everything.
Theoretically this sort of thing can already be achieved utilizing the fediseer on the UI, but this requires UI devs onboarding.
Likewise if they have trusted instances, they could serve as the first view for new accounts. These could provide a 3-tier system for new accounts according to their appetite for conflict. 1 only trusted. 2 trusted and non-hesitated. 3 everything.
That would be nice, be require indeed additional development
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.
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.
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.
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.
My instance already blocks hex, grad, and ml, so I’m halfway there lol.
The politics/news communities here, though, are present but highly curated since many of them do not meet our standards for preventing misinformation. Seriously, our rules are very strict after I first got started with Lemmy and saw what a complete shit show worldnews at
.mlwas.Defederating from the big 3 “extreme” instances is one thing and very doable. The problem with running a dedicated “no news/politics” instance would be preventing users from subscribing to any. The admin would have to on top of every news community that shows up and then administratively remove/hide those. That’s going to be a chore.
The admin would have to on top of every news community that shows up and then administratively remove/hide those. That’s going to be a chore.
Yes, and that brings another concept that Bluesky has and that we could use: crowdsourced blocklists. That way people can just add to the blocklist, and it gets blocked for everyone subscribing to that list.
In our case it would be done instance-level (we would need some hack so that other people can add to the communities blocklist of the instance) but the end result would be the same.
For what it’s worth on the newer versions of Lemmy with the ability to import settings files, you can create and share json files of blocked instances/communities without overwriting other user settings. Not as streamlined as what you’re describing, but it’s an option given current circumstances.
E.g.
blocklist.json
{"blocked_communities":["https://lemmy.site/c/meh","https://lemmy.site/c/mehbutmoremeh"],"blocked_instances":["unpleasantlemmy.site","lemming.mean"]}Oh, interesting! Would that overwrite the currently blocked communities, or could this be reused on a regular basis?
[…] you can create and share json files of blocked instances/communities without overwriting other user settings
I finally got around to testing this and found that it doesn’t overwrite existing blocks, merely adds them to your existing list. I made sure that the import file only contained new blocks and not duplicates to verify. You have to refresh the page to see the changes, and may take a few seconds depending on list length/instance performance, but it works.
Very interesting, thanks!
I think there are two issues:
- 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.
- 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.
We can go back to watching the world falling down around us some other time.
Seems like a nice conclusion.
Thank you for your comment!
A political-free space is an inherently political space.
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.
we need multi-communities (“mutireddits”) or something similar.
Piefed is on it: https://feddit.org/post/6709189?scrollToComments=true
Thank you for your comment, I agree with most of it
Piefed is looking more and more like the solution for the current Lemmy problems…
As you said in that thread it’s great for old users, but for newbies it would be amazing - if someone complains about too much politics we just need to link a collection (I like the name!) containing a huge set of hobby/fluff/entertainment communities, and let the person use that as their starting “all” feed.
I think themed social sites are the way to go for the fediverse, almost to the point where the theme doesn’t matter. Any theme. Any raison d’etre beyond “to be a general interest clone of what already exists”. So yeah, I think this is a good idea.
I think the suggestion also highlights some moderation/administration features that were missing when I first tinkered with self-hosting Lemmy a year ago. Are there tools to allow users to access these types of communities while keeping them hidden from the ‘All’ feed? There wasn’t last year. It would be ideal to designate sites and communities that are A) totally blocked/banned, B) accessible/subscribable but only via direct url search, C) searchable, but not available in All (or even local, for hidden local communities), D) accessible via All. Or even having different discovery vectors selectable via binary selection. The fine grained filtering to do such a thing would be a real boon in general, especially for sites that want to remain thematically focused, while not handcuffing users who want to be able to view stuff that’s off-topic.
Are there tools to allow users to access these types of communities while keeping them hidden from the ‘All’ feed?
Not that I know of, and that’s the core of the issue.
You can do this with
/api/v3/community/hide, or in the database by settingcommunity.hidden. Unfortunately this is not available from lemmy-ui yet.@OpenStars@discuss.online seems like an interesting feature
That’s great, thank you!
Yeah, so no change from last year. That was a core reason I abandoned my exploration of Lemmy for use hosting my softball team discussion group. I couldn’t prevent it from becoming polluted with my other community subscriptions.
It’s a totally overlooked usecase, that I increasingly believe should be a core use case for the software.
The question probably goes down to: should a member of your softball team discussion group be able to use that account to subscribe to !politics@lemmy.ml ?
Anyway, in your case, people would have
- local feed about the team
- All feed for all (minus the one you would defederate)
- Subscribed for their preferred communities
If you set the default feed to Local, that could work?
Should they? Yes. Focused sites should at least have the option to letting members follow unrelated communities.
But those communities shouldn’t necessarily be visible to everyone else, even via All. My teammates don’t need to be able to fingerprint each other’s niche hobbies, political interests, other-language communities, etc., even if I want to let them engage in those things however they like.
Like, maybe I don’t want politics@lemmy.ml showing up in All, but still want to let users find it and subscribe to it if they know it exists. That’s a real and reasonable use case, I think. But with fediverse software, end users introduce content into the All feeds, and thus into each other’s line of sight. The inability to restrict that at the instance level is quite limiting with respect to the kind of site one might want to present to the world.
The end result was going with a traditional forum. I’m watching nodeBB to see how stuff like this will be handled longer term.
The end result was going with a traditional forum. I’m watching nodeBB to see how stuff like this will be handled longer term.
Sounds good. Which forum software did you use?
“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 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.
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.
I would argue something like starter packs would be a better fit for this particular feature.
Maybe a starter pack that includes a starter blocklist? 🤔
That’s kinda what Bluesky has with their “moderation lists” or whatever it’s called. They have an entire dedicated MAGA one that blocks all MAGA accounts that join Bluesky automatically for whoever is subscribed to it
The issue is that starter packs would require development. This proposal can be implemented using the existing tools.
Not really, you would just need a community that’s focused on posting starter packs, and for people advertising Lemmy to others to direct people to that starter pack community when checking out Lemmy. There are things that could be developed to help make starter packs more useful, but it could start off as simply as just people making posts with lists of communities that people interested in crocheting or whatever should go check out.
We already have !newcommunities@lemmy.world that is supposed to fill another issue (discoverability of communities), and every week someone asks “how can I discover communities” on !asklemmy, someone points !newcommunities to them, and they say they weren’t aware of it.
It’s even in the rotating instances messages of Lemmy.world, but still.
As an example: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/20807896/12412717
I don’t know enough about this, but couldn’t a script be made that imports the starter pack for people? Instead of just politics, you can really customise them to fit a certain theme to help with the onboarding.
It could, but will it be is a different story. Everybody knows how difficult it can be to find people to write the code
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 !uk_politics@feddit.uk.
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.
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.
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
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.
@OpenStars@discuss.online as I know you like the topic
@Kecessa@sh.itjust.works as we discussed it just now
discuss.online would be a good candidate, but you’d want to get buy-in from @jgrim@discuss.online as well
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.
