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.
I think themed social sites are the way to go for the fediverse, almost to the point where the theme doesn’t matter. Any theme. Any raison d’etre beyond “to be a general interest clone of what already exists”. So yeah, I think this is a good idea.
I think the suggestion also highlights some moderation/administration features that were missing when I first tinkered with self-hosting Lemmy a year ago. Are there tools to allow users to access these types of communities while keeping them hidden from the ‘All’ feed? There wasn’t last year. It would be ideal to designate sites and communities that are A) totally blocked/banned, B) accessible/subscribable but only via direct url search, C) searchable, but not available in All (or even local, for hidden local communities), D) accessible via All. Or even having different discovery vectors selectable via binary selection. The fine grained filtering to do such a thing would be a real boon in general, especially for sites that want to remain thematically focused, while not handcuffing users who want to be able to view stuff that’s off-topic.
Not that I know of, and that’s the core of the issue.
Yeah, so no change from last year. That was a core reason I abandoned my exploration of Lemmy for use hosting my softball team discussion group. I couldn’t prevent it from becoming polluted with my other community subscriptions.
It’s a totally overlooked usecase, that I increasingly believe should be a core use case for the software.
The question probably goes down to: should a member of your softball team discussion group be able to use that account to subscribe to !politics@lemmy.ml ?
Anyway, in your case, people would have
If you set the default feed to Local, that could work?
Should they? Yes. Focused sites should at least have the option to letting members follow unrelated communities.
But those communities shouldn’t necessarily be visible to everyone else, even via All. My teammates don’t need to be able to fingerprint each other’s niche hobbies, political interests, other-language communities, etc., even if I want to let them engage in those things however they like.
Like, maybe I don’t want politics@lemmy.ml showing up in All, but still want to let users find it and subscribe to it if they know it exists. That’s a real and reasonable use case, I think. But with fediverse software, end users introduce content into the All feeds, and thus into each other’s line of sight. The inability to restrict that at the instance level is quite limiting with respect to the kind of site one might want to present to the world.
The end result was going with a traditional forum. I’m watching nodeBB to see how stuff like this will be handled longer term.
Sounds good. Which forum software did you use?