this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2025
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Fedigrow

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Idea: having a political-free instance for new joiners (feddit.org)
submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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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[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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 [email protected]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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

That really seems unwelcoming

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

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.