Fedigrow

Unfortunately everything is inherently political, but I can see the value of an instance that favors mainstream low controversial content.

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.

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.

If you removed political content from Lemmy there would be nothing left. All the other communities are dead.

A political-free space is an inherently political space.

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.

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.

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 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.

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."

"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.