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.orgOP
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    4 hours ago

    Learn to use your blocklists instead. Block communities, instances, and individuals that you don’t want to see.

    Everyone already here does that. We’re currently 42k monthly active users. If we want to have more niche communities (a complain usually expressed towards the platform), we have to find a way to make it easier to join without having to figure out from the get go how to block what is probably at least 50% of the content here.

    • Elevator7009@ani.social
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      3 hours ago

      People have to be willing to start those niche communities and slog it out alone for a bit.

      Speaking as [email protected] mod. Otome games don’t strictly have to be visual novels but most are, so practically it’s a subgenre of an already niche video game genre. Got a few subscribers and posters/commenters. Not nearly as big as Reddit’s 100,000ish, but still something. There are more on Mastodon, which I super appreciate the muting and blocking features of.

    • Cid Vicious@sh.itjust.works
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      4 hours ago

      I mean the solution if you don’t want to see a common topic on /c/all or whatever we call it on Lemmy is to subscribe to specific communities and just read those. But I don’t think Lemmy is really big enough for that yet. I think if you did that you would very quickly notice that you’re just seeing the same threads popping up on your feed (individual threads seem to stay active for much longer on Lemmy than on Reddit, owing to less overall content). So I just don’t see any obvious path to provide what you’re asking. A list of “default communities” like reddit used to have? There’s reasons why reddit killed that off, mainly because no one could agree on which communities should or shouldn’t be on the list. Individually curated “starter packs” like Bluesky is doing? I dunno you probably could do something like that with the import settings functionality.* I mean the solution if you don’t want to see a common topic on /c/all or whatever we call it on Lemmy is to subscribe to specific communities and just read those. But I don’t think Lemmy is really big enough for that yet. I think if you did that you would very quickly notice that you’re just seeing the same threads popping up on your feed (individual threads seem to stay active for much longer on Lemmy than on Reddit, owing to less overall content). So I just don’t see any obvious path to provide what you’re asking. A list of “default communities” like reddit used to have? There’s reasons why reddit killed that off, mainly because no one could agree on which communities should or shouldn’t be on the list. Individually curated “starter packs” like Bluesky is doing? I dunno you probably could do something like that with the import settings functionality. Edit: Perhaps individual instances could have their own lists of default communities. It would give a bit more flavor to which instance you choose. I don’t know if current Lemmy codebase would support this, though.

      • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOP
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        3 hours ago

        Individually curated “starter packs” like Bluesky is doing?

        Yes, that’s the idea. As an example from the OP: https://feddit.org/post/6554534

        I don’t know if current Lemmy codebase would support this, though.

        Negative, that would be a hack, like a pinned post on the new joiners instance or something similar.