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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.

155 comments

  • I think there are two issues:

    1. 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.
    2. 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 .ml was.

    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.

  • 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 !otomegames@ani.social 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 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.

  • 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.

  • 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 !stick@sh.itjust.works 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.

  • 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

      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.

  • 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

    I could see the first point being almost the default for topic-specific instances (along with not allowing NSFW material). Who wants to join a D&D, MTG, Star Wars, instance only to run headfirst into a Stalinist troll? With the caveat that I don't see them that much unless Russia gets a mention in !uk_politics@feddit.uk.

    I am unsure if the latter is needed - give people the option to subscribe or block politics, shitposts and memes. Perhaps start with the default to "Local" and have an introduction thread about it. However, I may be a statistical outlier as I default to "Local" and rarely use "All" and so don't run into things I am not signed up for.

    • "Please introduce me to Marxism (and Marxist Lemmy)", but get this, from this URL: https://startrek.website/post/18021528.

      That's the thing about how "federation" works -> it's their content, but unless a place is specifically added to a defederation list by name, it's also our content as well - in this case, Star.Trek.Website's content.

      Here's another interesting proof of concept: the farewell message from a server that died 10 months ago, but their message is preserved on the internet forever for others to read, if you know how and where to look (this particular one took more than a little bit of digging to find).

      You don't use All, but especially if you did just prior to an election - of pretty much any Western nation I would guess - oh the things that you would see....... yes, even from the Star Trek instance (Garak voice: especially from the Star Trek instance?:-P)

      • “Please introduce me to Marxism (and Marxist Lemmy)”, but get this, from this URL: https://startrek.website/post/18021528.

        That’s the thing about how “federation” works -> it’s their content, but unless a place is specifically added to a defederation list by name, it’s also our content as well - in this case, Star.Trek.Website’s content.

        Indeed, but: a) defederating the Three Big Bads would have stopped that coming through and b) that wouldn't appear in "Local" or "Subscribed" even if it is technically on your home instance.

  • I would counter and suggest that Lemmy implements a "default block" system that admins can set on their instance, i.e. the 3 you've mentioned, plus any others they want. When the account is created, the default blocks are applied (either instance or communities or ideally flexibility to add both).

    Users can then choose to unblock these if they want to engage with that content without moving instance.

    While portability is kind of a feature of the lemmyverse, your posts don't come with you so likely people wouldn't want to move off the "default" instance, which would create another problem with centralized instances.

    • I would counter and suggest that Lemmy implements a “default block” system that admins can set on their instance, i.e. the 3 you’ve mentioned, plus any others they want. When the account is created, the default blocks are applied (either instance or communities or ideally flexibility to add both).

      The issue is that requires development on Lemmy. The proposal in the OP can be done with the existing tools. Otherwise, I agree with you, what would be more elegant.

      • Not necessarily. Here is a discussion with a mod of sh.itjust.works who provided an alternate idea:

        something like autoblocking the instance on user creation… which might make more sense than outright defederation. A bot could probably be made to do that and send them a DM with instructions on how to change it off they so wish.

        Edit: it still would not block actual users from those instances though - only defederation, PieFed, or the Sync or Connect Lemmy apps can do that.

  • Me liking printed books more than ebooks is already a political matter, so... that would be difficult to offer political-free content.

    I think I already mentioned it, but my idea would be to have nothing for newcomers (so they don't get to see even a single political, or low effort post) beside a few tags/keywords/categories they could click in order to start having content displayed in their feed that they actually want to see, no matter how good or how bad it would be ;)

    edit: typos

    • By default new users could be sent to their Subscribed feed and see nothing, but then how do they know how to find content?

      The keywords/categories is a nice idea (similar to what https://piefed.social/ does with its "topics"), but would require modifications to the Lemmyy codebase. The approach I suggested is doable with the tools we have now (defederation, community-blocking at instance level)

      • By default new users could be sent to their Subscribed feed and see nothing, but then how do they know how to find content?

        the tags/categories I mentioned would do that. Nen users are supposed to know what they're interested in or what they're curious about so they would select those.

        The approach I suggested is doable with the tools we have now (defederation, community-blocking at instance level)

        I have little to no understanding of the technical considerations but I would think that if a technique involves defederation/blocking it also means it won't be bulletproof because, well, shit content does not always come from the same source(s).

  • Would you guys quit shittin all over blaze? Not everything is politcal. The issue is people making everything political. How the fuck are cat memes and let's say makeup, political? They're not.

    Some ppl just won't shut the fuck up about politics and it's super annoying. I think it's a great idea blaze has.

  • 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.

    • 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.

      • 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.

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

      • Mostly because this website is managed by the Lemmy devs, and what I'm suggesting is basically an instance without lemmy.ml, their instance

        And I hope it doesn't come too disrespectful towards their work, I think Lemmy as a software is a quite good Reddit replacement (the best we have so far, actually), but I also think we could benefit from an instant with less political content.

    • 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.

      • All very good points, which is why I think the political free instance shouldn't be temporary. People should be able to consider it their long term home.

  • @OpenStars@discuss.online as I know you like the topic

    @Kecessa@sh.itjust.works as we discussed it just now

    • discuss.online would be a good candidate, but you'd want to get buy-in from @jgrim@discuss.online as well

      • I was thinking about it, but I'm not sure Jgrim would like to completely remove all news and political communities.

        The issue here is that this instance would have to accept to not federate those communities, which can definitely be an issue for a generalist instance.

    • In reading through all of these comments, I hate to keep saying it, in case it comes across like I'm harping on the point or some such, but genuinely PieFed already does most of it.

      Want politics? Click Topics->News and Politics. Don't want news or politics? Click one other ones: Arts & Craft, Technology, Science, Gaming, Health, Hobbies, Music, etc.

      Okay so memes is problematic yeah, but you can also unsubscribe from communities too, as well as block any instance of your choice without requiring admin support to do so. Then reverse your decision at any time, then re-do it again later, back and forth as you choose (unlike defederation where you would miss all messages delivered during the period of defederation). Though most are not nearly so bad, like Arts & Crafts.

      You can also subscribe individually to something like !upliftingnews@lemmy.world and have it show up in your Subscribed feed. I barely used the Subscribed feed in Lemmy as it didn't seem to offer much in comparison to either All or visiting specific communities that I wanted to go to, like !fedimemes@feddit.uk that regardless of how well it competes with the more popular meme communities, I still enjoy more. But on PieFed I use the Subscribed feed all the time, it works for me better there. Also I have notifications sent to me for the smaller communities that nonetheless have the primary content that I want like !tenforward@lemmy.world or !starwarsmemes@lemmy.world, though we saw earlier how Favorites or customized Categories will likely be coming in 2025 and that will be an even better way.

      Right now some of the foundational aspects of PieFed suck, especially searching for content. Then again, Reddit's search sucks even harder so... how much will that matter to people? Tbf, Lemmy's search feature is nice, and I saw somewhere a plan to allow searching strictly for post titles rather than keywords in them - that effort is appreciated!

      I hope that the code being written in Python will help it grow faster. You might ask Rimu about some of these ideas mentioned here like a Trusted and Hesitated set of instances, if showing the former and by default at least blocking the latter for new people or those without accounts would help allow a better glimpse into the Threadiverse (minus Threads).

      Otherwise, if Admiral Patrick is willing to add this capability to Tesseract, then any instance willing to run that could gain that feature, though at the enormous cost that someone using an app would not be able to take advantage, I think? Btw did you see this post discussing adding Tesseract to sh.itjust.works?

      The OP idea sounds really cool too, except it would require someone to do it, and also I thought there were some major administrative issues with defederating from lemmy.ml, particularly in relation to communities. But if jgrim and m_f are on board with that... then that sounds wonderful?

      I do wonder how widespread the desire for it would be though. You and I might enjoy that, but how many others, really? Probably more than a few, but less than a lot? 😁

      • PieFed already does most of it.

        Piefed's main obstacle to adoption is lack of mobile apps. I know Thunder is being forked, hopefully once that is done Piefed will get more adoption. In the meantime Lemmy is still the go-to platform.

        it would require someone to do it,

        If any smaller instance would do this, they would become my go-to suggestion everytime I talk about Lemmy on Reddit

        do wonder how widespread the desire for it would be though.

        Thousands of people dissatisfied with Reddit enshittification. Including your friends you couldn't recommend Lemmy to 😄

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