Fedigrow

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.

I would argue something like starter packs would be a better fit for this particular feature.

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.

I think this (lack of politics) already exists to an extent. While you can't avoid politics entirely, they'l always find a way through. Users can join a server dedicated to the topics and/or hobbies they like. Or just with a vibe that they dig. If they like anime, they can join an anime focused server. Video games? Join a gaming server.

On Lemmy I feel the server doesn't matter as much since you can just join communities after account creation and communicate with other servers anyway. Pick the communities that suit you.

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

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 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.

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.

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.