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.
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:
(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.
I think that's a good idea. We already have lots of news, world news and articles about politics here. And I always like to see this platform being used for other kinds of conversation. And not just the link aggregator part of it.
I think there are two issues:
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."
“everything is political”
You can see someone below telling me !stick@sh.itjust.works is political. And it may be, but as you said, that's not the same type of politics we see in Politics or World News.
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
By default new users could be sent to their Subscribed feed and see nothing, but then how do they know how to find content?
The keywords/categories is a nice idea (similar to what https://piefed.social/ does with its "topics"), but would require modifications to the Lemmyy codebase. The approach I suggested is doable with the tools we have now (defederation, community-blocking at instance level)
By default new users could be sent to their Subscribed feed and see nothing, but then how do they know how to find content?
the tags/categories I mentioned would do that. Nen users are supposed to know what they're interested in or what they're curious about so they would select those.
The approach I suggested is doable with the tools we have now (defederation, community-blocking at instance level)
I have little to no understanding of the technical considerations but I would think that if a technique involves defederation/blocking it also means it won't be bulletproof because, well, shit content does not always come from the same source(s).
it won’t be bulletproof because, well, shit content does not always come from the same source(s).
Indeed, but it would already be an improvement to what we have now, and we can try it today, without having to wait for someone to modify the Lemmy code to add tags/categories for new joiners
Oh, 100% agree here, just wanted to make sure I understand your suggestion well ;)
Everythibg is inherently political. Plus people like politics or at least aggressively hating everyone else for what they like
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.
Why can't we have onboarding information on https://join-lemmy.org/?
Mostly because this website is managed by the Lemmy devs, and what I'm suggesting is basically an instance without lemmy.ml, their instance
And I hope it doesn't come too disrespectful towards their work, I think Lemmy as a software is a quite good Reddit replacement (the best we have so far, actually), but I also think we could benefit from an instant with less political content.
I wonder if we could maybe try to get it in one of these places? I swear there were other guide sites I had saved but I lost them when my kbin.social account died.
Not sure how useful that would be as join-lemmy will probably stay above in terms of SEO.
We could imagine a one page website with an introduction and the core concepts of Lemmy, but that would require some UI work to make it appealing
There are significant logistical hurdles to a dedicated onboarding-only site. For instance, who is going to run and pay for it? And why? What's really tying them to the site? What's driving that commitment?
With other sites -- even large, general purpose ones -- there is this sense that you are building a community. That you're doing this for the people who rely upon you and your work. And there's the hope that those people will stick around and contribute, either as moderators, or as funders, to help keep the lights on, and keep the space hygienic. But if the whole purpose of the space is for people to GTFO and find their "real" site... who are they doing this for? Why? And what are they getting out of it?
To set up and operate this is to get excited about being the cog in someone else's machine. Most of us are already cogs in someone else's machines, professionally. We're not going to want to do it as a hobby, too.
And for funding, if the whole purpose is for people to leave, they're not not going to pay you for being a temporary sandbox.
These are centralized, business-type solutions. This is not a centralized space. There is no umbrella corporation backing all of this. Loss leaders are not a solution. Asking someone to be the sacrificial lamb for the network is not reasonable.
One or more admins may run it if they came to an agreement. A capable admin or group of admins would have to put their hands up, but this is no different from any other instance.
As for paying and modding of the instance, the Onboarding Instance should come into existence through an organised Collective of existing and willing admins/mods/longtermusers from a range of Instances.
These are likely the people with the best experience to disseminate to new users. So would be important to take on the guiding roles needed in the onboarding instance communities, even if they have no technical oversight of the instance.
General growth of Lemmy, whats good for one is good for all. A large, and stable Lemmy user base will help give this network ongoing strength.
New users filtration into appropriate instances may temper the rapid expansion and domination of the majors like lemmy.world. While increasing the likelihood of users sticking around because they have found their place and have a clearer understanding. I suppose this also has a bonus of decreasing work for admins, eg, deleting users accounts and the like.
Own Instance growth. Some new users will inevitably filter through to your own instance. Assuming your instance takes new users.
cog in someone else's machine
Setting something like this up, i see, as an acceptance that Lemmy is hard to wrap your head around. And we as a network of disparate Instances can better organise ourselves in a mission to help the new-comers growing Lemmy.
Hello,
Thank you for your comment and proposal.
The potential issue with the approach you suggest is that once people leave the onboarding instance for another one, their feed is now filled with all the depressive posts we know are usually the most upvoted/discussed. Some might want to stay in the onboarding instance forever. Heck,, even I wouldn't mind having one of my alts there and just enjoy chill content.
I agree with the person yhat said subscribed isn’t that useful, i’ve found that as well.
That's interesting. It probably goes back to your aussie.zone being country-based. I have the same feeling on country instances, while general instances Local feed then to be too heterogeneous to be interesting.
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.
"Please introduce me to Marxism (and Marxist Lemmy)", but get this, from this URL: https://startrek.website/post/18021528.
That's the thing about how "federation" works -> it's their content, but unless a place is specifically added to a defederation list by name, it's also our content as well - in this case, Star.Trek.Website's content.
Here's another interesting proof of concept: the farewell message from a server that died 10 months ago, but their message is preserved on the internet forever for others to read, if you know how and where to look (this particular one took more than a little bit of digging to find).
You don't use All, but especially if you did just prior to an election - of pretty much any Western nation I would guess - oh the things that you would see....... yes, even from the Star Trek instance (Garak voice: especially from the Star Trek instance?:-P)
Like bOtH sIdEs SaMe
Important context here: the USA and Israel do genocide to Palestinians, whereas Russia does not do that to Ukrainians, China does not do that to Uyghurs, North Korea does not do that to its own people, etc. - just so you know. Ofc if you disagree, you will be banned from every community located on Lemmy.ml including those you've never even heard of, and in some cases reportedly without ever even interacting with that instance in the first place somehow, but based on a conversation elsewhere. Oh, but these rules aren't like, written down or anything helpful like that, no...
“Please introduce me to Marxism (and Marxist Lemmy)”, but get this, from this URL: https://startrek.website/post/18021528.
That’s the thing about how “federation” works -> it’s their content, but unless a place is specifically added to a defederation list by name, it’s also our content as well - in this case, Star.Trek.Website’s content.
Indeed, but: a) defederating the Three Big Bads would have stopped that coming through and b) that wouldn't appear in "Local" or "Subscribed" even if it is technically on your home instance.
Sorry, I must be too tired and focused on the "caveat" rather than the fact that we are in agreement on everything, so ofc in true Reddit style I had to write it as it I disagreed, I suppose? 🤡
To discuss how to grow and manage communities / magazines on Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed and Sublinks
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