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.
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? 😁
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.
If any smaller instance would do this, they would become my go-to suggestion everytime I talk about Lemmy on Reddit
Thousands of people dissatisfied with Reddit enshittification. Including your friends you couldn’t recommend Lemmy to 😄
The top reasons people avoid coming here iirc seemed like (a) “tankies”, (b) lack of niche content (Reddit legit has more…), and iirc (c) toxic interactions (which, really, I personally think Reddit is far worse in this regard? probably the lowest end is the same across both Lemmy and Reddit, but the niche subs there are more chill, mostly, compared to like r/all; also if a right-wing person were to come here and act like a Redditor, then yeah they legit may feel unwelcomed!:-P).
Defederating with the big 3 would mostly take care of the first issue (though there’s always more e.g. whenever a new person downvotes anything from the admin of Midwest.social and gets banned as a result they’ll have to discover that whole thing on their own; there’s only so much that can be done to create a walled garden effect). There’s little that can be done about the second issue - although bringing people in is likely to help with that longer-term. And blocking the political communities including memes masquerading as such is likely to help with the toxicity effect, ofc there’s always going to be people that refuse to control themselves and need to be blocked.
I agree, this looks interesting. It would require some effort. 💪
Indeed, I just made another post about the feature that allows to hide communities from All, let’s see how it goes 💪