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 this (lack of politics) already exists to an extent. While you can't avoid politics entirely, they'l always find a way through. Users can join a server dedicated to the topics and/or hobbies they like. Or just with a vibe that they dig. If they like anime, they can join an anime focused server. Video games? Join a gaming server.
On Lemmy I feel the server doesn't matter as much since you can just join communities after account creation and communicate with other servers anyway. Pick the communities that suit you.
On Lemmy I feel the server doesn’t matter as much since you can just join communities after account creation and communicate with other servers anyway.
Experience for someone joining today and almost leaving Lemmy altogether because the instance they picked was laggy and not federating properly
yeah this instance I’m on sucks. Realizing now that it definitely does not let you access everything from there. A lot of communities I’ve searched for and thought were missing just aren’t showing up in myserv.one’s search results. Here I was thinking that there wasn’t even a functional non-binary community in the lemmyverse or fediverse or whatever.
Typically you do want to join a community with a good amount of users. it doesn't have to be the most popular of instances but if it has few then 100 users then less content might federate onto that specific server.
However, there is a solution to your problem that you described even if your server is federated around as good:
One way you can still get those missing servers is by first finding them with this if you find a community you like copy and paste the handler into Lemmy search on your server and then it should come up:
(https://lemmyverse.net/communities)
I am aware of the way to solve the issue, but expecting a new joiner who just registered on the platform to copy-paste the communities links from a third-party website to the search to fetch them is unrealistic.