Owners and Guides
One or more admins may run it if they came to an agreement. A capable admin or group of admins would have to put their hands up, but this is no different from any other instance.
As for paying and modding of the instance, the Onboarding Instance should come into existence through an organised Collective of existing and willing admins/mods/longtermusers from a range of Instances.
These are likely the people with the best experience to disseminate to new users. So would be important to take on the guiding roles needed in the onboarding instance communities, even if they have no technical oversight of the instance.
The payoffs
- The key is to ensure new users leave the onboarding sandbox, if that fails, then you’re correct.
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General growth of Lemmy, whats good for one is good for all. A large, and stable Lemmy user base will help give this network ongoing strength.
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New users filtration into appropriate instances may temper the rapid expansion and domination of the majors like lemmy.world. While increasing the likelihood of users sticking around because they have found their place and have a clearer understanding. I suppose this also has a bonus of decreasing work for admins, eg, deleting users accounts and the like.
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Own Instance growth. Some new users will inevitably filter through to your own instance. Assuming your instance takes new users.
Finally
cog in someone else’s machine
Setting something like this up, i see, as an acceptance that Lemmy is hard to wrap your head around. And we as a network of disparate Instances can better organise ourselves in a mission to help the new-comers growing Lemmy.
Yeah, i shouldn’t have waded into the technical stuff, i knew i’d get it mixed up! My bad!
I would never dream of migrations like that. Theres lots of doubling of Communities on Lemmy. Its, for the most part, been quite a healthy thing to have multiple communities on the same or very similar topics.
Some haven’t worked and are dead while others thrive, it provides an outlet for disagreements with overzealous mods, sometimes the minute differences in the worldnews commujities really makes a difference in the types of posts on each of them.
The above aside, So the idea i’m suggesting is strictly onboarding topics on the Local. Meaning the Local for anyone who’s been around a while could find the Local quite boring, that in itself acts as a nudge for new users to move when theyre ready.
So no c/funny, or c/movies, communities, as you say others have got good communities going on those topics already.
The onboarding topics would include things like c/Choose a Home Instance, c/What is Fediverse, c/What is Lemmy, c/what the hell is Peertube, etc. Stuff like that, this is all of the top of my head so take the names for their vibe, not literally.
The ‘onboarding only instance’ matches your requirement of not being too political too quickly for newbies and avoids the questions of how far to go with whats defined as political. Because on the instance you will be deemed off topic if the comments aren’t in relation to the new users setting themselves up on Lemmy. However, it has the added bonus of new users being able to go into All to see the real deal, then fall back into Local of they need context for something they’ve seen.