Hard disagree like others. Going to an instance already takes you to “Local” and “Active”, which is literally the “Default Communities” because it’s what’s active on that instance. Quit trying to fit Lemmy into a Reddit box because it‘s not always necessary.

I have to disagree. So far I'm finding the Lemmy experience very pleasant, mostly because I am looking for communities that I am personally interested in and nothing else. Any "default" that I actually miss, I can just sought them out.

I would LOVE something like multireddits on Lemmy. I actually do not like the idea of default subscriptions (unless it's optional), but making custom multis is something that I'd really love to have on here.

Agree with the general consensus saying no to default communities. Maybe a “recommended” list that it displays for you while you’re still new (like… maybe until you have 5-8 communities subscribed to) but I don’t think you should be forced into certain ones at the start.

Hard disagree

Not the default, but ask to subscribe would be good for general users.; this way power users can still benefit from the vanilla experience

I feel like the ease of use is not an issue. I would like users to actually think about the content they want to consume and perhaps find new ideas in the process through engaging. Sorting by all > active as a default is not a bad thing, and I quite enjoy it. I think this is a great place to start giving people full autonomy in the content they consume right from the beginning, we dont need training wheels..

I agree, it should be transparent and decided on by the instance but think even a few beginner oriented defaults would be helpful. I think the onboarding and default lemmy experience is quite poor and anything to reduce friction for new users should be encouraged if it can be done transparently.

A middle ground might be a somewhat filtered front page without an account. Maybe suggested ones based on popularity with some filters to avoid suggesting NSFW subs.