Hello everyone,
Thinking about this as the on-boarding experience on Lemmy can be subpar, especially because new joiners have to
- find a list of communities they could like (something like this post https://feddit.org/post/6554534, but should be there as a default)
- browse All and stumble upon all the news, political and tech that we know (https://lemmy.world/?dataType=Post&sort=TopDay)
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.
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)
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.
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).
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 ;)