this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2025
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Fedigrow

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Idea: having a political-free instance for new joiners (feddit.org)
submitted 2 weeks 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

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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[–] Gorgritch_umie_killa@aussie.zone 0 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

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.

[–] Kichae@lemmy.ca 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Gorgritch_umie_killa@aussie.zone 0 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

Owners and Guides

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.

The payoffs

  • The key is to ensure new users leave the onboarding sandbox, if that fails, then you're correct.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. Own Instance growth. Some new users will inevitably filter through to your own instance. Assuming your instance takes new users.

Finally

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.

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[–] Blaze@feddit.org -1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] Emperor@feddit.uk 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 0 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

"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 SaMeimg

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...

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[–] recreationalcatheter@lemm.ee -3 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Hide the reality of this place so new users can be duped into engaging with great minds like universalmonk or yogthos?

Are you kidding me?

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