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.
Honestly might be a good idea, but easily corruptible.
Thank you for your feedback
The onboarding issue isn’t politics or which instances are federated, it’s that federations exist for all to see when it’s something that should impact the server side only and users should come to Lemmy and feel like they’re joining just any other centralized website.
they’re joining just any other centralized website.
That’s not the case. Users have to attach themselves to an instance or another, and the content they will be able to see will change accordingly. That’s how ActivityPub works
I know that’s not the case, I’m saying that’s much more of an issue when it comes to onboarding than anything else that was mentioned in the OP.
Instances will be what keeps Lemmy from ever becoming a true Reddit alternative.
Hide the reality of this place so new users can be duped into engaging with great minds like universalmonk or yogthos?
Are you kidding me?
It’s the opposite, those two would probably be banned from the instance
Tankie spotted.
Unfortunately everything is inherently political, but I can see the value of an instance that favors mainstream low controversial content.
How is [email protected] political?
Do you want to discuss the relationship between class and time-intense hobbies? Between learning/onboarding opportunites and race? The intersection of race, class, and hobbies? The ethics and economics of the sourcing of wool?
Just because there are aspects that can be political doesn’t mean a hobby itself is political.
I mean digging a hole can be a threat under specific circumstances but that doesn’t mean that all digging of holes is inherently threatening.
Everything is political.
Everything.
How is [email protected] political?
This game is a good thought experiment that you can play yourself.
It can help to see connections and interests in all the different facets of society.
I’ll help you out with the stick community though (I’m sure you can think of lots of other examples of how it’s political):
Take a wood product into a country with strict quarantine.
Maybe one of those sticks was removed from a protected area.
Try carry that stick into a secure area, suddenly it’s a weapon. You don’t agree? Better argue your case to politicians who wrote those laws.
The idea that anything could be political is good for keeping an open mind, but it is not inherently true without making ‘political’ so vague to be meaningless.
Rain is not political. How we use rainfall can be political, as well as the impact global warming has on rainfall payterns. That doesn’t make rain itself political.
I take your point.
A water molecule is not inherently political, there is no ‘politics’ one can observe under an electron microscope.
However, I am approaching from the perspective that humans are perceiving that water. And given that humans are political with everything then all actions/perceptions humans have are political.
Reminds me when someone told me that [email protected] was political due to the way plants are managed in flats.
Fine, if the “political” label isn’t appropriate (which could indeed be the case), how about “stress inducing”?
May I interest you in some other totally non-political Trad-Wife content then? /s
Please no 😅
It’s hard for me to tell if this comment is sarcastic or not. Considering we’re on Lemmy, I guess it’s serious? But it really feels like it’s straight from a skit.
I read it as a series of rhetorical questions intended to illustrate how crochet is political, even if nobody is going in with the intent of being political (e.g. a crochet group specifically for PoliticalPartyNameHereMembers, people creating crochet projects showing support for this or that politician’s platform).
That said, if they approached me at a crochet group asking me those questions I would feel very uncomfortable. And then I’d torture myself over okay but are they doing that because the discomfort is needed to encourage you to make a change for the better? Or are they just enjoying making me feel bad for having enough privilege to have a hobby? Or am I just presuming bad intent on their part so I do not have to face the uncomfortable thing and make an inconvenient change? My own shocker I’m not white guilt complex may or may not be showing—I’m painfully aware how bad others have it while 1) I don’t have it nearly as bad through no merit of my own but mere chance, and 2) I don’t dedicate my every waking hour to optimizing these less fortunate peoples’ outcomes. I guess what I was trying to get at here is, point gotten that crochet is political, but (perhaps because of my own personal hangups, as well as the usual issues involved in reading tone online, with no tone of voice or body language to guide us) it also reads kind of confrontational instead of just calmly informative.
How do you obtain materials for knitting? Your choice is political.
Why did you choose to participate in [email protected]? That was a political choice.
Your choice of using synthetic yarn rather than the superior animal based product shows how woke you really are!
Synthetic yarns are woke? I didn’t realize supporting oil companies was woke now.
Behold: Political debate about yarn of all things.
If you removed political content from Lemmy there would be nothing left. All the other communities are dead.
They are not, as mentioned in the OP: https://feddit.org/post/6554534
20 active communities which are not politics, news, memes or tech
They are indeed drown in the political content, but that’s what this suggestion is trying to solve
There would be Linux, Garfield, Calvin & Hobbes, and soooo much anime. Why is there so much anime!?!
ani.social user, hi!
I’m honestly not sure where people get these images from. Yes, they do often post the source, but I wonder. Is someone specifically searching for art to post on all those communities? Does the art just turn up in their usual browsing and they pass it onto us here?
Something something people visual content engagement blah blah idk?
At least it’s all on one instance
Linux is semi-political, a most of the talk revolves around Foss in general not Linux itself
Anime would definitely have to be blocked for a good user experience
I see lots of at-least-weekly-active communities that aren’t politics but also don’t garner hundreds of upvotes. I’m not sure what the “dead” threshold for you is. Admittedly I also avoid political content like the plague and hide out in my little Subscribed-sometimes-Local hole, but the fact I can do this at all and come back to new posts every day means all the other communities are not dead. They just don’t critical mass. Even without algorithms specifically tuned to push people to outrage bait, engagement bait, people still just naturally interact more with the outraging things.
Unless you are joking and I just ruined it.
Sad but true
I think there are two issues:
- It sure would be nice if there were some “choose my experience” features at a broader scale than individually taking responsibility for blocking all the noisy instances and noisy people, for whatever your personal definition of noise is. A checkbox like “hide political content” or “downplay political content”, and then similar checkboxes for meme content, content for a particular geographical region, popular media and entertainment, and so on, would be an absolutely wonderful thing. I think PieFed has something somewhat similar to this but it’s at about 10% of where it could be. I think Lemmy inherited Reddit’s “you can either have the default or else invest a huge amount of time into customizing” model, but it doesn’t need to. We should have a lot more rich ways of deciding what the algorithm and experience is going to be than just a massive array of individual “yes” or “no” buttons.
- Some of why your suggestion would be nice is cultural, not technical. People seem like they like to have their “home” instance where they can kind of make friends and read content from like-minded people, irrespective of how whatever algorithm is tuned. Personally I love political content and news, but I could see an instance that just turns it all off for people who aren’t into it being a rare island of wholesome interactions on Lemmy, simply because of the types of people who would choose to go there. We can go back to watching the world falling down around us some other time.
We can go back to watching the world falling down around us some other time.
Seems like a nice conclusion.
Thank you for your comment!
My instance already blocks hex, grad, and ml, so I’m halfway there lol.
The politics/news communities here, though, are present but highly curated since many of them do not meet our standards for preventing misinformation. Seriously, our rules are very strict after I first got started with Lemmy and saw what a complete shit show worldnews at
.mlwas.Defederating from the big 3 “extreme” instances is one thing and very doable. The problem with running a dedicated “no news/politics” instance would be preventing users from subscribing to any. The admin would have to on top of every news community that shows up and then administratively remove/hide those. That’s going to be a chore.
The admin would have to on top of every news community that shows up and then administratively remove/hide those. That’s going to be a chore.
Yes, and that brings another concept that Bluesky has and that we could use: crowdsourced blocklists. That way people can just add to the blocklist, and it gets blocked for everyone subscribing to that list.
In our case it would be done instance-level (we would need some hack so that other people can add to the communities blocklist of the instance) but the end result would be the same.
For what it’s worth on the newer versions of Lemmy with the ability to import settings files, you can create and share json files of blocked instances/communities without overwriting other user settings. Not as streamlined as what you’re describing, but it’s an option given current circumstances.
E.g.
blocklist.json
{"blocked_communities":["https://lemmy.site/c/meh","https://lemmy.site/c/mehbutmoremeh"],"blocked_instances":["unpleasantlemmy.site","lemming.mean"]}Oh, interesting! Would that overwrite the currently blocked communities, or could this be reused on a regular basis?
[…] you can create and share json files of blocked instances/communities without overwriting other user settings
I finally got around to testing this and found that it doesn’t overwrite existing blocks, merely adds them to your existing list. I made sure that the import file only contained new blocks and not duplicates to verify. You have to refresh the page to see the changes, and may take a few seconds depending on list length/instance performance, but it works.
Very interesting, thanks!
I realize that a lot of people have a strong dislike of politics, but you wouldn’t see so much political discussion if there wasn’t an equally large number of people who engage in it. I think most people on Lemmy are probably reading the all feed rather than just local anyway, so one instance not allowing political communities wouldn’t really do much. Politics aren’t really limited to specific instances so defederating wouldn’t really help.
Learn to use your blocklists instead. Block communities, instances, and individuals that you don’t want to see. For whatever reason I find myself blocking far more individuals on Lemmy than I ever did on Reddit, perhaps because there are a higher percentage of people with extremist views on various topics here.
Learn to use your blocklists instead. Block communities, instances, and individuals that you don’t want to see.
Everyone already here does that. We’re currently 42k monthly active users. If we want to have more niche communities (a complain usually expressed towards the platform), we have to find a way to make it easier to join without having to figure out from the get go how to block what is probably at least 50% of the content here.
People have to be willing to start those niche communities and slog it out alone for a bit.
Speaking as [email protected] mod. Otome games don’t strictly have to be visual novels but most are, so practically it’s a subgenre of an already niche video game genre. Got a few subscribers and posters/commenters. Not nearly as big as Reddit’s 100,000ish, but still something. There are more on Mastodon, which I super appreciate the muting and blocking features of.
I recently discussed with @[email protected] about [email protected] (Age of Mythology)
I guess in your case being about a genre rather than a specific game helps
I mean the solution if you don’t want to see a common topic on /c/all or whatever we call it on Lemmy is to subscribe to specific communities and just read those. But I don’t think Lemmy is really big enough for that yet. I think if you did that you would very quickly notice that you’re just seeing the same threads popping up on your feed (individual threads seem to stay active for much longer on Lemmy than on Reddit, owing to less overall content). So I just don’t see any obvious path to provide what you’re asking. A list of “default communities” like reddit used to have? There’s reasons why reddit killed that off, mainly because no one could agree on which communities should or shouldn’t be on the list. Individually curated “starter packs” like Bluesky is doing? I dunno you probably could do something like that with the import settings functionality.* I mean the solution if you don’t want to see a common topic on /c/all or whatever we call it on Lemmy is to subscribe to specific communities and just read those. But I don’t think Lemmy is really big enough for that yet. I think if you did that you would very quickly notice that you’re just seeing the same threads popping up on your feed (individual threads seem to stay active for much longer on Lemmy than on Reddit, owing to less overall content). So I just don’t see any obvious path to provide what you’re asking. A list of “default communities” like reddit used to have? There’s reasons why reddit killed that off, mainly because no one could agree on which communities should or shouldn’t be on the list. Individually curated “starter packs” like Bluesky is doing? I dunno you probably could do something like that with the import settings functionality. Edit: Perhaps individual instances could have their own lists of default communities. It would give a bit more flavor to which instance you choose. I don’t know if current Lemmy codebase would support this, though.
Individually curated “starter packs” like Bluesky is doing?
Yes, that’s the idea. As an example from the OP: https://feddit.org/post/6554534
I don’t know if current Lemmy codebase would support this, though.
Negative, that would be a hack, like a pinned post on the new joiners instance or something similar.
I think that having a “newcomers” instance is a great idea. The main things that need to be ironed out are:
(1) The limits of what is/isn’t allowed within that instance. Instead of focusing on what is/isn’t political, let’s focus on what shuns your typical user away:
- anything government-related. Presidents and wars and public policies and political parties and… you get it.
- content that TL;DR to “GAFAM/Musk/Meta/OpenAI are fucking everything up”.
- content that makes people soapbox.
- content that makes you say “humankind is fucked up”.
(2) Behaviour rules. I feel like people saying “eeew Lemmy is nasty” don’t do that just because of the content here, but also because of how users behave.
(3) If users should be encouraged to migrate to other instances once they feel comfortable with the Fediverse.
Additionally: we need multi-communities (“mutireddits”) or something similar. Having a list of communities that you can link once, and get other people to follow, would be a godsend.
we need multi-communities (“mutireddits”) or something similar.
Piefed is on it: https://feddit.org/post/6709189?scrollToComments=true
Thank you for your comment, I agree with most of it
Piefed is looking more and more like the solution for the current Lemmy problems…
As you said in that thread it’s great for old users, but for newbies it would be amazing - if someone complains about too much politics we just need to link a collection (I like the name!) containing a huge set of hobby/fluff/entertainment communities, and let the person use that as their starting “all” feed.
I know that when I first arrived here I was grateful for “how federation works” guides. I don’t know how I found [email protected] but was happy I did, and I think pointing newbies at that would be helpful too.
Because I was already used to Reddit and learned magazines/communities were like that, and I moved over when lists of magazines/communities that were equivalent to subreddits were still a thriving thing, I duplicated my Reddit habits and looked for communities with my interests, completely ignoring anything outside that (aka, always shunning All/Popular) because of how much of it would turn out to be in those four bullet points you outlined.
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.
Are there tools to allow users to access these types of communities while keeping them hidden from the ‘All’ feed?
Not that I know of, and that’s the core of the issue.
You can do this with
/api/v3/community/hide, or in the database by settingcommunity.hidden. Unfortunately this is not available from lemmy-ui yet.@[email protected] seems like an interesting feature
That’s great, thank you!
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 [email protected] ?
Anyway, in your case, people would have
- local feed about the team
- All feed for all (minus the one you would defederate)
- Subscribed for their preferred communities
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 [email protected] 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.
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?
I think that’s a good idea. We already have lots of news, world news and articles about politics here. And I always like to see this platform being used for other kinds of conversation. And not just the link aggregator part of it.
I feel like the intent of this post is obvious. Whether you personally believe it’s a good idea or not is one thing; but there seem to be quite a lot of people responding to “let’s avoid politics!” with “everything is political”. It frustrates me.
Yes, I understand and agree with the fact that every small little action is informed by unpleasantly political realities like our demographics, our own explicitly political beliefs, who it affects negatively, who it benefits, etc. But if I ask “hey, is this instance full of politics?” I think it’s quite obvious I want to avoid a feed full of depressing news, threads about how [political candidate] and their supporters are being awful today (even if I agree). That even if my feed full of anime and cute animals and whatever else is still political (by my choice to avoid politics, ability to do so, the fact cute animals are prioritized for how they look while other important animals get less attention, by anime being Japanese and reflecting their culture and views, etc.), it’s not really quite the same kind of political as what you would see in Politics or WorldNews or the like. I feel as if people are pointing out an unhelpful and depressing technical reality that runs counter to what I feel is the obvious intent.
I don’t want to come in and assert that the posts I don’t like must so obviously be made in bad faith, and would like to understand the intent behind these posts. Especially since to me they read less as “hey, you might want to consider this small little choice actually has effects… how everything can be political,” a friendly informational statement, and more as “let us set up a community free of politics—BUT EVERYTHING IS POLITICS GOTCHA.”
“everything is political”
You can see someone below telling me [email protected] is political. And it may be, but as you said, that’s not the same type of politics we see in Politics or World News.
“default subreddits” worked well for Reddit as it was growing, I would expect it to work here as well if curated well.
Granted, it did not work out well for atheism, which was a default sub and wreaked havoc on the cultural implications of openly identifying as an atheist.
Maybe keep religion out of it this time.
A political-free space is an inherently political space.
There’s no such thing as “politics-free”. Everything is political. Are you going to ban also comms about veganism? climate? LGBT? even gaming is political (just look at the cringelords of gamergate).
On top of that, you don’t know is the person who is interested in lemmy wants to join a “status-quo” instance like that or not. What if they were hoping to talk about some political subjects and now realize they cannot without making a new account? Bad experience.
There may be a point to be made about defaulting users to comms with less potential for flamewars, but that would require some sort of backend update.
Everything is political.
I tried to touch on that in the disclaimer at the end. I know that politics and societal issues are important and should be discussed extensively.
The issue we have now is that the All feed is overwhelmingly about serious and depressing topics. It’s a hard sell to get people to join a platform that just seems as negative as Reddit, but without even the niche communities to make up for it.
you don’t know is the person who is interested in lemmy wants to join a “status-quo” instance like that or not.
Indeed, so the plan would be to have something like
- join casualinstance.org is you want a casual experience
- join lemmy.dbzer0.com if you want an experience with politics and news
Similar to what I already with when I suggest both discuss.online and sopuli.xyz depending on the user location: https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1i0652l/for_the_love_of_everything_i_just_want_to_know/m6web7p/
I feel this functionality could be covered by this or this feature request. Basically if your instance admin has hesitated instances, new users shouldn’t see them. Likewise if they have trusted instances, they could serve as the first view for new accounts. These could provide a 3-tier system for new accounts according to their appetite for conflict. 1 only trusted. 2 trusted and non-hesitated. 3 everything.
Theoretically this sort of thing can already be achieved utilizing the fediseer on the UI, but this requires UI devs onboarding.
Likewise if they have trusted instances, they could serve as the first view for new accounts. These could provide a 3-tier system for new accounts according to their appetite for conflict. 1 only trusted. 2 trusted and non-hesitated. 3 everything.
That would be nice, be require indeed additional development
