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.

  • Gorgritch_Umie_KillaEnglish
    1·
    2 hours ago

    Owners and Guides

    One or more admins may run it if they came to an agreement. A capable admin or group of admins would have to put their hands up, but this is no different from any other instance.

    As for paying and modding of the instance, the Onboarding Instance should come into existence through an organised Collective of existing and willing admins/mods/longtermusers from a range of Instances.

    These are likely the people with the best experience to disseminate to new users. So would be important to take on the guiding roles needed in the onboarding instance communities, even if they have no technical oversight of the instance.

    The payoffs

    • The key is to ensure new users leave the onboarding sandbox, if that fails, then you’re correct.

    1. General growth of Lemmy, whats good for one is good for all. A large, and stable Lemmy user base will help give this network ongoing strength.

    2. New users filtration into appropriate instances may temper the rapid expansion and domination of the majors like lemmy.world. While increasing the likelihood of users sticking around because they have found their place and have a clearer understanding. I suppose this also has a bonus of decreasing work for admins, eg, deleting users accounts and the like.

    3. Own Instance growth. Some new users will inevitably filter through to your own instance. Assuming your instance takes new users.

    Finally

    cog in someone else’s machine

    Setting something like this up, i see, as an acceptance that Lemmy is hard to wrap your head around. And we as a network of disparate Instances can better organise ourselves in a mission to help the new-comers growing Lemmy.

    • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
      11·
      2 hours ago

      The key is to ensure new users leave the onboarding sandbox, if that fails, then you’re correct.

      When you think about it, Lemmy.world is currently the sandbox. And even though a few people leave every time LW makes a debatable move (piracy communities, not defederating Threads, vegan cat food modifying the ToS, reminding people that hate speech is a thing in European laws, the most recent “flat earthers welcome” policy change), a lot of the people are still there, while they should probably be looking for another place.

      But people don’t like to move. That’s also why the vast majority of people is still on WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit.