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’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/?
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
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.
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.
Own Instance growth. Some new users will inevitably filter through to your own instance. Assuming your instance takes new users.
Finally
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have an alt on a country instance, so I can compare, it’s vastly different.
People can block those in their settings now. What we don’t have is a way to define a default blocklist applicable to all new users. A way to achieve the same result is either hiding (see the other post on this topic in the same community) or blocking those communities, but that has to be done by the admin.
The issue with the strong Local feed is that it’s unrealistic to migrate all the “chill” communities listed on https://feddit.org/post/6554534 on the new instance, and it’s also unrealistic to expect the Local feed to be as active as those communities. Lemmy is small, !funny@sh.itjust.works and !movies@lemm.ee are good where they are, nobody is going to replicate all of their content to the new instance local feed.
Yeah, i shouldn’t have waded into the technical stuff, i knew i’d get it mixed up! My bad!
I would never dream of migrations like that. Theres lots of doubling of Communities on Lemmy. Its, for the most part, been quite a healthy thing to have multiple communities on the same or very similar topics.
Some haven’t worked and are dead while others thrive, it provides an outlet for disagreements with overzealous mods, sometimes the minute differences in the worldnews commujities really makes a difference in the types of posts on each of them.
The above aside, So the idea i’m suggesting is strictly onboarding topics on the Local. Meaning the Local for anyone who’s been around a while could find the Local quite boring, that in itself acts as a nudge for new users to move when theyre ready.
So no c/funny, or c/movies, communities, as you say others have got good communities going on those topics already.
The onboarding topics would include things like c/Choose a Home Instance, c/What is Fediverse, c/What is Lemmy, c/what the hell is Peertube, etc. Stuff like that, this is all of the top of my head so take the names for their vibe, not literally.
The ‘onboarding only instance’ matches your requirement of not being too political too quickly for newbies and avoids the questions of how far to go with whats defined as political. Because on the instance you will be deemed off topic if the comments aren’t in relation to the new users setting themselves up on Lemmy. However, it has the added bonus of new users being able to go into All to see the real deal, then fall back into Local of they need context for something they’ve seen.
Now I understand more your vision.
But then, there still needs to be some curation for the All feed, otherwise people will find the same depressing All feed we currently do, and just leave.