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Fedigrow @lemm.ee Blaze (he/him) @feddit.org

Idea: having a political-free instance for new joiners

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.

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  • 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.

    • Why can't we have onboarding information on https://join-lemmy.org/?

    • There are significant logistical hurdles to a dedicated onboarding-only site. For instance, who is going to run and pay for it? And why? What's really tying them to the site? What's driving that commitment?

      With other sites -- even large, general purpose ones -- there is this sense that you are building a community. That you're doing this for the people who rely upon you and your work. And there's the hope that those people will stick around and contribute, either as moderators, or as funders, to help keep the lights on, and keep the space hygienic. But if the whole purpose of the space is for people to GTFO and find their "real" site... who are they doing this for? Why? And what are they getting out of it?

      To set up and operate this is to get excited about being the cog in someone else's machine. Most of us are already cogs in someone else's machines, professionally. We're not going to want to do it as a hobby, too.

      And for funding, if the whole purpose is for people to leave, they're not not going to pay you for being a temporary sandbox.

      These are centralized, business-type solutions. This is not a centralized space. There is no umbrella corporation backing all of this. Loss leaders are not a solution. Asking someone to be the sacrificial lamb for the network is not reasonable.

      • 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.

        • The key is to ensure new users leave the onboarding sandbox, if that fails, then you’re correct.

          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.

          • 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 NewUser8000@onboardinginstanceY.com

            • That they are expected to move off the Instance within, for instance, a month or two.

              That really seems unwelcoming

              • 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.

    • Hello,

      Thank you for your comment and proposal.

      The potential issue with the approach you suggest is that once people leave the onboarding instance for another one, their feed is now filled with all the depressive posts we know are usually the most upvoted/discussed. Some might want to stay in the onboarding instance forever. Heck,, even I wouldn't mind having one of my alts there and just enjoy chill content.

      I agree with the person yhat said subscribed isn’t that useful, i’ve found that as well.

      That's interesting. It probably goes back to your aussie.zone being country-based. I have the same feeling on country instances, while general instances Local feed then to be too heterogeneous to be interesting.

      • That’s interesting. It probably goes back to your aussie.zone being country-based

        Why would your instance affect your subscribed feed? I would have thought that's the one feed where it should be irrelevant which instance you're on. All is a combination of everything that anyone on your instance has ever subscribed to, so smaller more homogeneous instances will have a fairly simple homogeneous All. And Local is, obviously...Local. But you choose which communities are in your Subscribed. The only thing your instance should change is whether or not downvotes are counted.

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