Awesome post, theres so much in here that i’m going to apply.

Unfortunately i still have to resort to baiting as a last resort. I try to use only rat/mouse traps now but in old houses with lots of narrow hidey holes it can be hard to place the traps where the rats/mice will see/smell them.

Finally got to read this, very interesting. Its one of those series of events i definitely think i should be better acquainted witj as an aussie.

Thanks Baku! I’s originally aiming for one event post a week, i think i’ll stick to the more personally interesting posts. Thwt’ll still be quite a few, but other people will have to do things like AFL and such :) If they want it.

I’d thought things like weekend markets arpund the State could go in a weekly thread like you suggest

Kind of, but theres definitely gota be limits to that.

Like energy production through hydro, definitely doesn’t work like that. Nuclear won’t either, so maybe for batteries, solar and wind its possible for intermixing on farmland, in the gaps, or above.

Also things like power lines crossing wheat farms might be hard to negotiate with farmers.

Yeah, i think i needed yours and Lodion’s responses to remind me to keep it to events i actually find interesting. Cheers.

Sorry folks someone else is gona have to post about the Western Derby ;)

I’m gona take what you’ve said here to heart, and try to remember it. As you say, lots of people are ready and very willing to give their advice, its not always for the best of reasons. Thanks.

Ok, cheers for the guidance. I’ll carry on with the idea, but might tone it down a bit.

They actually look very cool all together luke that!

Its good to see Ken Wyatt getting stuck in,

As Ken Wyatt says,

Their logic on this leads them to the obvious question, why stand in fron tof the Union Jack then?

The only divisive people in regards this flag are the people trying to drag an Australian symbol into yet another of their race-baiting pantomime culture wars.

This lady flips about more than a fish on a jetty.

I remember when she flipped her opinion on the State lockdown when she realised, rather belatedly, they’d made themselves electoral toast.

Seems she’ll say and do anything for popular vote. Sounds like a great and strong potential leader for the State. /s

Maybe Basil Zempilas wasn’t in the wrong to have a go for the leadership a couple months back if this is the leadership the Liberals are offering.

Is this Adelaide? Where are all the churches in this picture?..

I’ve been misled by an ad campaign again!

Check your assumptions. The Israeli’s are just as likely.

Not really, because the very people who will be telling them this is an ‘onboarding instance, we eventually want you to choose another instance and move there’, will also be the ones telling them all about the possible instances the new comers can move to.

Maybe its a bit like an orientation at a university. They are specifically not the same as the courses students will eventually attend, the orientation (onboarding instance) has a different purpose to the course (home instance). You may meet people you’ll never see again, the guides role isn’t to be the course lecturers/administrators (analogous in this case to mods/admins) that you’ll interact with throughout your course.

There might be a little passing sadness if you get to the end of orientation if you’ve had a very enjoyable experience, but the student (user) has expected the end, they’ve known when and why its coming. And hopefully if they’ve enjoyed the experience on the onboarding instance that much, they are that much more excited for the next steps.

Exactly what i’ve been thinking! It reminds me of an article i heard a while back about some development near Flemington in Victoria.

Their solve, if i remember correctly, was a wall of concrete, which simply moved the flooding issue further downstream, too bad for people downstream i suppose??

I’m assuming the developers like the idea of concrete, but i wonder if the government has thought that far ahead.

Yeah i agree, LW seems to be the defacto sandbox.

So the issue with LW is users history becomes a barrier to exit. An onboarding instance needs to make clear that it is an introductory instance for newcomers to discover and learn lemmy. That they are expected to move off the Instance within, for instance, a month or two.

If new users expectations are set to understand this, their investment in the profile itself will be lower.

You could disable themeing attributes like usernames and icons for users to make clear the transitory nature of their user profile. I’m not sure i’m fully there with that, but it could be a useful tactic. Replace usernames with a number for instance, or [email protected]

1. Yeah, i shouldn’t have waded into the technical stuff, i knew i’d get it mixed up! My bad!

2. I would never dream of migrations like that. Theres lots of doubling of Communities on Lemmy. Its, for the most part, been quite a healthy thing to have multiple communities on the same or very similar topics.

Some haven’t worked and are dead while others thrive, it provides an outlet for disagreements with overzealous mods, sometimes the minute differences in the worldnews commujities really makes a difference in the types of posts on each of them.

The above aside, So the idea i’m suggesting is strictly onboarding topics on the Local. Meaning the Local for anyone who’s been around a while could find the Local quite boring, that in itself acts as a nudge for new users to move when theyre ready.

So no c/funny, or c/movies, communities, as you say others have got good communities going on those topics already.

The onboarding topics would include things like c/Choose a Home Instance, c/What is Fediverse, c/What is Lemmy, c/what the hell is Peertube, etc. Stuff like that, this is all of the top of my head so take the names for their vibe, not literally.

The ‘onboarding only instance’ matches your requirement of not being too political too quickly for newbies and avoids the questions of how far to go with whats defined as political. Because on the instance you will be deemed off topic if the comments aren’t in relation to the new users setting themselves up on Lemmy. However, it has the added bonus of new users being able to go into All to see the real deal, then fall back into Local of they need context for something they’ve seen.

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.

It probably goes back to your aussie.zone being country-based

This is likely the reason.

Maybe the above difference we have in our user experiences is why from my perspective this looks like it’ll work, and why it doesn’t look like it from your perspective.

Some might want to stay in the onboarding instance forever

Thats where i think the active mods in those Local Communities acting as guides for new users is essential.

For example, ‘Home Instance Selection’ would need mods actively putting up links and guides for selecting an instance, while actively discovering new ones, then responding to questions newcomers have about certain instances. Basically the mods on that community would be signing up for something akin to a city’s Tourism Stand.

It seems the divisive posts/instances, can only really be avoided three ways.

1. An as yet unavailable technical fix to allow users to block instances,
2. by convincing your instance to defederate, or
3. by having a strong Local to fall back away from All/Subscribed into.

I’m advocating to lean into the third option as the best way to deal with the divisive post/instances from the outset. It seems to leverage the decentralised but connected nature of fediverse best as well.

I’ve tried to read through and understand all the comments. I have certainly failed in doing that, so bear with me if this has already been covered.

Can’t we spin up an ‘onboarding’ instance? Where Local is focused on helping new people navigate and understand this stuff with focused communities to navigate Lemmy, understand Fediverse, Choose Instance, even communities run by adjacent fediverse participants like piefed, mastodon, peertube etc.

The instance could have a clear onboarding mission, with an expectation that as users become acclimatised they will move off to start trying a ‘home’ server. Their account could be activated only for a period of time on that server.

The delineation between Local, subsrcibed and All can be leveraged here to provide a safe harbour with active mods ready to guide, while allowing Lemmy Full Blast on All, so people understand the reality of Lemmy.

This would also provide an experience a lot like the experience i generally have with Lemmy, AZ is cool, sometimes a little sleepy but rarely any real issues or drama. When i’m up for it, i venture onto All, but its easy to deal with because i know i can just switch back to Local whenever i want. I imagine this is what its like for most users on medium to smaller instances.

I agree with the person yhat said subscribed isn’t that useful, i’ve found that as well. Maybe thats poor subscriptions by myself to blame for that though.

Mate if you’ve been holding back helping the Ukrainians more until something like this has happened, theres something wrong with the your perception of this conflict.

Also that Melbourne School Teachers a true aussie hero.