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.

  • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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    5 hours ago

    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.

    • Elevator7009@ani.social
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      3 hours ago

      I know that when I first arrived here I was grateful for “how federation works” guides. I don’t know how I found !newcommunities@lemmy.world but was happy I did, and I think pointing newbies at that would be helpful too.

      Because I was already used to Reddit and learned magazines/communities were like that, and I moved over when lists of magazines/communities that were equivalent to subreddits were still a thriving thing, I duplicated my Reddit habits and looked for communities with my interests, completely ignoring anything outside that (aka, always shunning All/Popular) because of how much of it would turn out to be in those four bullet points you outlined.

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
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    10 hours ago

    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.

  • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝@feddit.uk
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    7 hours ago

    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
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      4 hours ago

      “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

      img

      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…

      • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝@feddit.uk
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        4 hours ago

        “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.

        • OpenStars@discuss.online
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          4 hours ago

          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? 🤡

  • ericjmorey@discuss.online
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    16 hours ago

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

      • Kichae@lemmy.ca
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        16 hours ago

        Do you want to discuss the relationship between class and time-intense hobbies? Between learning/onboarding opportunites and race? The intersection of race, class, and hobbies? The ethics and economics of the sourcing of wool?

        • snooggums@lemmy.world
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          16 hours ago

          Just because there are aspects that can be political doesn’t mean a hobby itself is political.

          I mean digging a hole can be a threat under specific circumstances but that doesn’t mean that all digging of holes is inherently threatening.

            • snooggums@lemmy.world
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              9 hours ago

              The idea that anything could be political is good for keeping an open mind, but it is not inherently true without making ‘political’ so vague to be meaningless.

              Rain is not political. How we use rainfall can be political, as well as the impact global warming has on rainfall payterns. That doesn’t make rain itself political.

              • mortemtyrannis@lemmy.ml
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                8 hours ago

                I take your point.

                A water molecule is not inherently political, there is no ‘politics’ one can observe under an electron microscope.

                However, I am approaching from the perspective that humans are perceiving that water. And given that humans are political with everything then all actions/perceptions humans have are political.

              • mortemtyrannis@lemmy.ml
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                8 hours ago

                This game is a good thought experiment that you can play yourself.

                It can help to see connections and interests in all the different facets of society.

                I’ll help you out with the stick community though (I’m sure you can think of lots of other examples of how it’s political):

                Take a wood product into a country with strict quarantine.

                Maybe one of those sticks was removed from a protected area.

                Try carry that stick into a secure area, suddenly it’s a weapon. You don’t agree? Better argue your case to politicians who wrote those laws.

        • crimeschneck∈🇩🇪⊂🇪🇺@feddit.nl
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          14 hours ago

          It’s hard for me to tell if this comment is sarcastic or not. Considering we’re on Lemmy, I guess it’s serious? But it really feels like it’s straight from a skit.

          • Elevator7009@ani.social
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            2 hours ago

            I read it as a series of rhetorical questions intended to illustrate how crochet is political, even if nobody is going in with the intent of being political (e.g. a crochet group specifically for PoliticalPartyNameHereMembers, people creating crochet projects showing support for this or that politician’s platform).

            That said, if they approached me at a crochet group asking me those questions I would feel very uncomfortable. And then I’d torture myself over okay but are they doing that because the discomfort is needed to encourage you to make a change for the better? Or are they just enjoying making me feel bad for having enough privilege to have a hobby? Or am I just presuming bad intent on their part so I do not have to face the uncomfortable thing and make an inconvenient change? My own shocker I’m not white guilt complex may or may not be showing—I’m painfully aware how bad others have it while 1) I don’t have it nearly as bad through no merit of my own but mere chance, and 2) I don’t dedicate my every waking hour to optimizing these less fortunate peoples’ outcomes. I guess what I was trying to get at here is, point gotten that crochet is political, but (perhaps because of my own personal hangups, as well as the usual issues involved in reading tone online, with no tone of voice or body language to guide us) it also reads kind of confrontational instead of just calmly informative.

        • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOP
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          16 hours ago

          Reminds me when someone told me that !houseplants@mander.xyz was political due to the way plants are managed in flats.

          Fine, if the “political” label isn’t appropriate (which could indeed be the case), how about “stress inducing”?

  • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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    15 hours ago

    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.
    • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOP
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      13 hours ago

      We can go back to watching the world falling down around us some other time.

      Seems like a nice conclusion.

      Thank you for your comment!

  • peregrin5@lemm.ee
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    16 hours ago

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

    • Elevator7009@ani.social
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      1 hour ago

      I see lots of at-least-weekly-active communities that aren’t politics but also don’t garner hundreds of upvotes. I’m not sure what the “dead” threshold for you is. Admittedly I also avoid political content like the plague and hide out in my little Subscribed-sometimes-Local hole, but the fact I can do this at all and come back to new posts every day means all the other communities are not dead. They just don’t critical mass. Even without algorithms specifically tuned to push people to outrage bait, engagement bait, people still just naturally interact more with the outraging things.

      Unless you are joking and I just ruined it.

      • Elevator7009@ani.social
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        1 hour ago

        ani.social user, hi!

        I’m honestly not sure where people get these images from. Yes, they do often post the source, but I wonder. Is someone specifically searching for art to post on all those communities? Does the art just turn up in their usual browsing and they pass it onto us here?

        Something something people visual content engagement blah blah idk?

      • hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        12 hours ago

        Linux is semi-political, a most of the talk revolves around Foss in general not Linux itself

        Anime would definitely have to be blocked for a good user experience

  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.org
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    16 hours 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 (he/him)@feddit.orgOP
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      16 hours 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.

      • ElectroVagrant@lemmy.world
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        10 hours ago

        For what it’s worth on the newer versions of Lemmy with the ability to import settings files, you can create and share json files of blocked instances/communities without overwriting other user settings. Not as streamlined as what you’re describing, but it’s an option given current circumstances.

        E.g.
        blocklist.json
        {"blocked_communities":["https://lemmy.site/c/meh","https://lemmy.site/c/mehbutmoremeh"],"blocked_instances":["unpleasantlemmy.site","lemming.mean"]}

        • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOP
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          10 hours ago

          Oh, interesting! Would that overwrite the currently blocked communities, or could this be reused on a regular basis?

          • ElectroVagrant@lemmy.world
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            10 hours ago

            […] you can create and share json files of blocked instances/communities without overwriting other user settings

            I finally got around to testing this and found that it doesn’t overwrite existing blocks, merely adds them to your existing list. I made sure that the import file only contained new blocks and not duplicates to verify. You have to refresh the page to see the changes, and may take a few seconds depending on list length/instance performance, but it works.

  • Kichae@lemmy.ca
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    16 hours ago

    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.

    • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOP
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      16 hours ago

      Are there tools to allow users to access these types of communities while keeping them hidden from the ‘All’ feed?

      Not that I know of, and that’s the core of the issue.

      • Kichae@lemmy.ca
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        15 hours ago

        Yeah, so no change from last year. That was a core reason I abandoned my exploration of Lemmy for use hosting my softball team discussion group. I couldn’t prevent it from becoming polluted with my other community subscriptions.

        It’s a totally overlooked usecase, that I increasingly believe should be a core use case for the software.

        • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOP
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          14 hours ago

          The question probably goes down to: should a member of your softball team discussion group be able to use that account to subscribe to !politics@lemmy.ml ?

          Anyway, in your case, people would have

          • local feed about the team
          • All feed for all (minus the one you would defederate)
          • Subscribed for their preferred communities

          If you set the default feed to Local, that could work?

          • Kichae@lemmy.ca
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            13 hours ago

            Should they? Yes. Focused sites should at least have the option to letting members follow unrelated communities.

            But those communities shouldn’t necessarily be visible to everyone else, even via All. My teammates don’t need to be able to fingerprint each other’s niche hobbies, political interests, other-language communities, etc., even if I want to let them engage in those things however they like.

            Like, maybe I don’t want politics@lemmy.ml showing up in All, but still want to let users find it and subscribe to it if they know it exists. That’s a real and reasonable use case, I think. But with fediverse software, end users introduce content into the All feeds, and thus into each other’s line of sight. The inability to restrict that at the instance level is quite limiting with respect to the kind of site one might want to present to the world.

            The end result was going with a traditional forum. I’m watching nodeBB to see how stuff like this will be handled longer term.

            • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOP
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              11 hours ago

              The end result was going with a traditional forum. I’m watching nodeBB to see how stuff like this will be handled longer term.

              Sounds good. Which forum software did you use?

  • Skiluros@sh.itjust.works
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    16 hours ago

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

      • OpenStars@discuss.online
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        5 hours ago

        Except instance blocklists don’t really work much, and are too controversial, and some kind of community sourced user blocklist also is far too controversial. Libs blocking tankies, tankies blocking neolibs, so many in the middle blocking neither, or perhaps both I dunno:-P.

      • cm0002@lemmy.world
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        15 hours ago

        That’s kinda what Bluesky has with their “moderation lists” or whatever it’s called. They have an entire dedicated MAGA one that blocks all MAGA accounts that join Bluesky automatically for whoever is subscribed to it

    • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOP
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      15 hours ago

      The issue is that starter packs would require development. This proposal can be implemented using the existing tools.

      • Kaja@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        15 hours ago

        Not really, you would just need a community that’s focused on posting starter packs, and for people advertising Lemmy to others to direct people to that starter pack community when checking out Lemmy. There are things that could be developed to help make starter packs more useful, but it could start off as simply as just people making posts with lists of communities that people interested in crocheting or whatever should go check out.

        • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOP
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          14 hours ago

          We already have !newcommunities@lemmy.world that is supposed to fill another issue (discoverability of communities), and every week someone asks “how can I discover communities” on !asklemmy, someone points !newcommunities to them, and they say they weren’t aware of it.

          It’s even in the rotating instances messages of Lemmy.world, but still.

          • OpenStars@discuss.online
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            5 hours ago

            Some interesting facts:

            • the release date of 0.19.3 was 2024-01-24
            • also one year ago, when Lemmy.World defederated from Lemmygrad.ml, they said “Due to the severity of the posts and comments, we are not waiting for the next Lemmy update that will allow users to block instances.”
            • two years ago this post also mentions “Unlike Mastodon, Lemmy does not provide a feature for individual users to block an instance (yet). This creates a dilemma where we must either defederate [or]…”

            Fast-forward to today, and Lemmy still does not offer the ability to block users from an instance. Or for reports to federate to moderators on remote instances. The pace of development is quite slow, and shows little signs of speeding up. Furthermore, why would those same admins of lemmy.ml be in favor of sharing the same power that they wield on that instance with everyone using this software?

            Rust is not a language conducive to making many changes to the codebase. I predict that one year from now there will be little change in the Lemmy software, with people still begging for features that they hoped for two years ago already. To be clear it’s not the fault of the developers, but of people having too high expectations and hopes.

            So yeah, the OP idea is a good one, but I’ll cover that separately and here just wanted to say that the slow pace of new features is by design of the language used, and people must simply get used to that.

  • Demigodrick@lemmy.zip
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    16 hours ago

    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.

    • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOP
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      15 hours ago

      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).

      The issue is that requires development on Lemmy. The proposal in the OP can be done with the existing tools. Otherwise, I agree with you, what would be more elegant.

      • OpenStars@discuss.online
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        5 hours ago

        Not necessarily. Here is a discussion with a mod of sh.itjust.works who provided an alternate idea:

        something like autoblocking the instance on user creation… which might make more sense than outright defederation. A bot could probably be made to do that and send them a DM with instructions on how to change it off they so wish.

        Edit: it still would not block actual users from those instances though - only defederation, PieFed, or the Sync or Connect Lemmy apps can do that.

  • zante@slrpnk.net
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    15 hours ago

    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

    • poVoq@slrpnk.net
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      15 hours ago

      Slrpnk.net doesn’t have any politics on it.

      Looks like our plan to secretly implant political ideas is successful then. The best propaganda is the one you don’t notice at all 😅

      On a more serious note though: sure, feel free to enjoy the not directly political communities on our instance.

    • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOP
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      15 hours ago

      https://slrpnk.net/?dataType=Post&listingType=All&sort=TopDay

      • Memes about Zuckerberg and Meta
      • Screenshot about exploitation of people
      • Drawing about fires and their monetization
      • Comic about the military being a trap
      • Comic with making the USA part of Denmark
      • Meme about the fires
      • Meme about people getting homeless after the fires

      By browsing all, you will be limited to your instance, while most of the interesting communities (whatever your interests are) are on others.

      • zante@slrpnk.net
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        15 hours ago

        In that case the other commenter is right - remove that and you have next to nothing.

        But You either shield people , or you don’t . If people wants to explore annd find communities , surely they understand there will be some they like and some they don’t.

  • Libb@jlai.lu
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    16 hours ago

    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

    • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOP
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      16 hours ago

      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)

      • Libb@jlai.lu
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        16 hours ago

        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).

        • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOP
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          16 hours ago

          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

          • Libb@jlai.lu
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            16 hours ago

            Oh, 100% agree here, just wanted to make sure I understand your suggestion well ;)

  • Alice@hilariouschaos.com
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    16 hours ago

    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.

  • Rob200@discuss.tchncs.de
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    16 hours ago

    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.

    • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOP
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      16 hours ago

      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.

      Experience for someone joining today and almost leaving Lemmy altogether because the instance they picked was laggy and not federating properly

      yeah this instance I’m on sucks. Realizing now that it definitely does not let you access everything from there. A lot of communities I’ve searched for and thought were missing just aren’t showing up in myserv.one’s search results. Here I was thinking that there wasn’t even a functional non-binary community in the lemmyverse or fediverse or whatever.

      • Rob200@discuss.tchncs.de
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        16 hours ago

        Typically you do want to join a community with a good amount of users. it doesn’t have to be the most popular of instances but if it has few then 100 users then less content might federate onto that specific server.

        However, there is a solution to your problem that you described even if your server is federated around as good: One way you can still get those missing servers is by first finding them with this if you find a community you like copy and paste the handler into Lemmy search on your server and then it should come up: (https://lemmyverse.net/communities)

        • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOP
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          15 hours ago

          I am aware of the way to solve the issue, but expecting a new joiner who just registered on the platform to copy-paste the communities links from a third-party website to the search to fetch them is unrealistic.

          • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe
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            14 hours ago

            This is a major issue.

            New users run the gamut of tech neophyte to very old hands. Both have reasons for not wanting to do this, even more, not knowing this can be done. As part of the “old hand” crowd, frankly I don’t have the time to go look for this stuff - it really needs to be upfront when you join.

            I think, overall, what you’re talking about is the Discovery process for a new user. And with new users being new to lemmy, they don’t understand how it all works. I’ve yet to sign up to a new instance and have anything clarified, up front - how lemmy works, and not just “federated like email”, but how your stuff isn’t replicated (I get this, but most people don’t automatically get the implications of “federated, like email”). Also, what communities they federate, what they block, etc, again, in detail. This isn’t done because documentation is hard, no one likes to do it - I’m as guilty of this as anyone.

            Getting new servers to do this would be challenging, but just like the sidebar for a community, it’s really crucial.

            I think you’re on to a good idea.

            • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOP
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              14 hours ago

              This isn’t done because documentation is hard, no one likes to do it - I’m as guilty of this as anyone.

              There are a few posts on !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca, but they are far from exhaustive, and how to get new users there automatically is another challenge.

          • Rob200@discuss.tchncs.de
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            15 hours ago

            Yes. But really what I was aiming to be getting at when I said (in relation to your post) that on Lemmy the server doesn’t matter as much as say on Mastodon is because you can just join a community that is not dedicated to politics that you like. It was a general look at it.

    • OpenStars@discuss.online
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      4 hours ago

      In reading through all of these comments, I hate to keep saying it, in case it comes across like I’m harping on the point or some such, but genuinely PieFed already does most of it.

      Want politics? Click Topics->News and Politics. Don’t want news or politics? Click one other ones: Arts & Craft, Technology, Science, Gaming, Health, Hobbies, Music, etc.

      Okay so memes is problematic yeah, but you can also unsubscribe from communities too, as well as block any instance of your choice without requiring admin support to do so. Then reverse your decision at any time, then re-do it again later, back and forth as you choose (unlike defederation where you would miss all messages delivered during the period of defederation). Though most are not nearly so bad, like Arts & Crafts.

      You can also subscribe individually to something like !upliftingnews@lemmy.world and have it show up in your Subscribed feed. I barely used the Subscribed feed in Lemmy as it didn’t seem to offer much in comparison to either All or visiting specific communities that I wanted to go to, like !fedimemes@feddit.uk that regardless of how well it competes with the more popular meme communities, I still enjoy more. But on PieFed I use the Subscribed feed all the time, it works for me better there. Also I have notifications sent to me for the smaller communities that nonetheless have the primary content that I want like !tenforward@lemmy.world or !starwarsmemes@lemmy.world, though we saw earlier how Favorites or customized Categories will likely be coming in 2025 and that will be an even better way.

      Right now some of the foundational aspects of PieFed suck, especially searching for content. Then again, Reddit’s search sucks even harder so… how much will that matter to people? Tbf, Lemmy’s search feature is nice, and I saw somewhere a plan to allow searching strictly for post titles rather than keywords in them - that effort is appreciated!

      I hope that the code being written in Python will help it grow faster. You might ask Rimu about some of these ideas mentioned here like a Trusted and Hesitated set of instances, if showing the former and by default at least blocking the latter for new people or those without accounts would help allow a better glimpse into the Threadiverse (minus Threads).

      Otherwise, if Admiral Patrick is willing to add this capability to Tesseract, then any instance willing to run that could gain that feature, though at the enormous cost that someone using an app would not be able to take advantage, I think? Btw did you see this post discussing adding Tesseract to sh.itjust.works?

      The OP idea sounds really cool too, except it would require someone to do it, and also I thought there were some major administrative issues with defederating from lemmy.ml, particularly in relation to communities. But if jgrim and m_f are on board with that… then that sounds wonderful?

      I do wonder how widespread the desire for it would be though. You and I might enjoy that, but how many others, really? Probably more than a few, but less than a lot? 😁

      • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOP
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        16 hours ago

        I was thinking about it, but I’m not sure Jgrim would like to completely remove all news and political communities.

        The issue here is that this instance would have to accept to not federate those communities, which can definitely be an issue for a generalist instance.

        • jgrim@discuss.online
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          11 hours ago

          I agree, plus, people can block politics if they want already. Perhaps help improve onboarding documentation would help more than a kiddie pool instance. That does sound nice though. Perhaps a new instance that’s a subdomain of discuss.online or a new domain.

          • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOP
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            11 hours ago

            improve onboarding documentation

            The issue is to get the documentation to the new joiners. There are quite a few insightful posts on !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca , but the new joiners don’t have any way to know that’s where they should go

            kiddie pool

            I see it more like a chill garden instance, but kiddie pool works too I guess 😄