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.

  • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
    2·
    19 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.onlineEnglish
      1·
      8 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.

      • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
        1·
        2 hours ago

        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.

        Hasn’t a bot have to be developed? 😄