Idea: having a political-free instance for new joiners (feddit.org)

submitted 4 days ago by Blaze@feddit.org to c/fedigrow@lemm.ee

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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

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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[-] ptz@dubvee.org 9 points 4 days ago

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.

[-] Blaze@feddit.org 4 points 4 days ago

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.

this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2025

24 points (74.0% liked)

Fedigrow

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