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.
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.
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.
I wonder if we could maybe try to get it in one of these places? I swear there were other guide sites I had saved but I lost them when my kbin.social account died.
Not sure how useful that would be as join-lemmy will probably stay above in terms of SEO.
We could imagine a one page website with an introduction and the core concepts of Lemmy, but that would require some UI work to make it appealing