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.

“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 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.

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.

If you removed political content from Lemmy there would be nothing left. All the other communities are dead.

I think there are two issues:

1. 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.
2. 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.

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 .ml was.

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.

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 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.

I would argue something like starter packs would be a better fit for this particular feature.

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.

@OpenStars@discuss.online as I know you like the topic

@Kecessa@sh.itjust.works as we discussed it just now

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