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.
For what it’s worth on the newer versions of Lemmy with the ability to import settings files, you can create and share json files of blocked instances/communities without overwriting other user settings. Not as streamlined as what you’re describing, but it’s an option given current circumstances.
E.g.
blocklist.json
{"blocked_communities":["https://lemmy.site/c/meh","https://lemmy.site/c/mehbutmoremeh"],"blocked_instances":["unpleasantlemmy.site","lemming.mean"]}Oh, interesting! Would that overwrite the currently blocked communities, or could this be reused on a regular basis?
I finally got around to testing this and found that it doesn’t overwrite existing blocks, merely adds them to your existing list. I made sure that the import file only contained new blocks and not duplicates to verify. You have to refresh the page to see the changes, and may take a few seconds depending on list length/instance performance, but it works.
Very interesting, thanks!