Fedigrow

I like this idea!

Unfortunately everything is inherently political, but I can see the value of an instance that favors mainstream low controversial content.

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

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.

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.

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 feel like the intent of this post is obvious. Whether you personally believe it's a good idea or not is one thing; but there seem to be quite a lot of people responding to "let's avoid politics!" with "everything is political". It frustrates me.

Yes, I understand and agree with the fact that every small little action is informed by unpleasantly political realities like our demographics, our own explicitly political beliefs, who it affects negatively, who it benefits, etc. But if I ask "hey, is this instance full of politics?" I think it's quite obvious I want to avoid a feed full of depressing news, threads about how [political candidate] and their supporters are being awful today (even if I agree). That even if my feed full of anime and cute animals and whatever else is still political (by my choice to avoid politics, ability to do so, the fact cute animals are prioritized for how they look while other important animals get less attention, by anime being Japanese and reflecting their culture and views, etc.), it's not really quite the same kind of political as what you would see in Politics or WorldNews or the like. I feel as if people are pointing out an unhelpful and depressing technical reality that runs counter to what I feel is the obvious intent.

I don't want to come in and assert that the posts I don't like must so obviously be made in bad faith, and would like to understand the intent behind these posts. Especially since to me they read less as "hey, you might want to consider this small little choice actually has effects… how everything can be political," a friendly informational statement, and more as "let us set up a community free of politics—BUT EVERYTHING IS POLITICS GOTCHA."

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.

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.

Just join a catmeme instance and browse local, not all.

Slrpnk.net doesn’t have any politics on it. You can read about mushroom and collecting rainwater and recycling and never encounter anything polarising.

Edit :

The other thing, is that most of what passes for politics on Lemmy, is really just news and rage bait. Very few of the hundreds of submission about what Trump said or What China did, or what Pelosi think are political, they just amplify inflammatory messages

I think this (lack of politics) already exists to an extent. While you can't avoid politics entirely, they'l always find a way through. Users can join a server dedicated to the topics and/or hobbies they like. Or just with a vibe that they dig. If they like anime, they can join an anime focused server. Video games? Join a gaming server.

On Lemmy I feel the server doesn't matter as much since you can just join communities after account creation and communicate with other servers anyway. Pick the communities that suit you.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

A political-free space is an inherently political space.