Idea: having a political-free instance for new joiners (feddit.org)

submitted 3 months ago by Blaze@feddit.org to c/fedigrow@lemm.ee

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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.

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[-] ElectroVagrant@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago

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"]}

[-] Blaze@feddit.org 3 points 3 months ago

Oh, interesting! Would that overwrite the currently blocked communities, or could this be reused on a regular basis?

[-] ElectroVagrant@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago

[...] you can create and share json files of blocked instances/communities without overwriting other user settings

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.