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.
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I like this idea!
If you removed political content from Lemmy there would be nothing left. All the other communities are dead.
They are not, as mentioned in the OP: https://feddit.org/post/6554534
20 active communities which are not politics, news, memes or tech
They are indeed drown in the political content, but that’s what this suggestion is trying to solve
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.”
@[email protected] as I know you like the topic
@[email protected] as we discussed it just now
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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] or [email protected], 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? 😁
PieFed already does most of it.
Piefed’s main obstacle to adoption is lack of mobile apps. I know Thunder is being forked, hopefully once that is done Piefed will get more adoption. In the meantime Lemmy is still the go-to platform.
it would require someone to do it,
If any smaller instance would do this, they would become my go-to suggestion everytime I talk about Lemmy on Reddit
do wonder how widespread the desire for it would be though.
Thousands of people dissatisfied with Reddit enshittification. Including your friends you couldn’t recommend Lemmy to 😄
Once again I am astounded at mobile apps being the blocker. I use the Fediverse nearly exclusively from mobile on the browser and my experience is totally fine.
I’m the same boat as you, but it’s a matter of preference.
Some people were using old.reddit from their browser, but the reason the whole API fiasco happened is because people couldn’t use their third party apps anymore.
discuss.online would be a good candidate, but you’d want to get buy-in from @[email protected] as well
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?
It’s the opposite, those two would probably be banned from the instance
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
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.
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
.mlwas.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.
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.
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"]}
There’s no such thing as “politics-free”. Everything is political. Are you going to ban also comms about veganism? climate? LGBT? even gaming is political (just look at the cringelords of gamergate).
On top of that, you don’t know is the person who is interested in lemmy wants to join a “status-quo” instance like that or not. What if they were hoping to talk about some political subjects and now realize they cannot without making a new account? Bad experience.
There may be a point to be made about defaulting users to comms with less potential for flamewars, but that would require some sort of backend update.
Everything is political.
I tried to touch on that in the disclaimer at the end. I know that politics and societal issues are important and should be discussed extensively.
The issue we have now is that the All feed is overwhelmingly about serious and depressing topics. It’s a hard sell to get people to join a platform that just seems as negative as Reddit, but without even the niche communities to make up for it.
you don’t know is the person who is interested in lemmy wants to join a “status-quo” instance like that or not.
Indeed, so the plan would be to have something like
- join casualinstance.org is you want a casual experience
- join lemmy.dbzer0.com if you want an experience with politics and news
Similar to what I already with when I suggest both discuss.online and sopuli.xyz depending on the user location: https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1i0652l/for_the_love_of_everything_i_just_want_to_know/m6web7p/
I feel this functionality could be covered by this or this feature request. Basically if your instance admin has hesitated instances, new users shouldn’t see them. Likewise if they have trusted instances, they could serve as the first view for new accounts. These could provide a 3-tier system for new accounts according to their appetite for conflict. 1 only trusted. 2 trusted and non-hesitated. 3 everything.
Theoretically this sort of thing can already be achieved utilizing the fediseer on the UI, but this requires UI devs onboarding.
I would argue something like starter packs would be a better fit for this particular feature.
Maybe a starter pack that includes a starter blocklist? 🤔
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.
Unfortunately everything is inherently political, but I can see the value of an instance that favors mainstream low controversial content.
How is [email protected] political?
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?
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.
Everything is political.
Everything.
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.
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.
