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.
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.
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.
Indeed, so the plan would be to have something like
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.
That would be nice, be require indeed additional development