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.
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.