@OpenStars@discuss.online as I know you like the topic
@Kecessa@sh.itjust.works as we discussed it just now
this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2025
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Fedigrow
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To discuss how to grow and manage communities / magazines on Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed and Sublinks
Resources:
- https://lemmy-federate.com/ to federated your community to a lot of instances
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discuss.online would be a good candidate, but you'd want to get buy-in from @jgrim@discuss.online as well
I was thinking about it, but I'm not sure Jgrim would like to completely remove all news and political communities.
The issue here is that this instance would have to accept to not federate those communities, which can definitely be an issue for a generalist instance.
I agree, plus, people can block politics if they want already. Perhaps help improve onboarding documentation would help more than a kiddie pool instance. That does sound nice though. Perhaps a new instance that’s a subdomain of discuss.online or a new domain.
improve onboarding documentation
The issue is to get the documentation to the new joiners. There are quite a few insightful posts on !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca , but the new joiners don't have any way to know that's where they should go
kiddie pool
I see it more like a chill garden instance, but kiddie pool works too I guess 😄
In reading through all of these comments, I hate to keep saying it, in case it comes across like I'm harping on the point or some such, but genuinely PieFed already does most of it.
Want politics? Click Topics->News and Politics. Don't want news or politics? Click one other ones: Arts & Craft, Technology, Science, Gaming, Health, Hobbies, Music, etc.
Okay so memes is problematic yeah, but you can also unsubscribe from communities too, as well as block any instance of your choice without requiring admin support to do so. Then reverse your decision at any time, then re-do it again later, back and forth as you choose (unlike defederation where you would miss all messages delivered during the period of defederation). Though most are not nearly so bad, like Arts & Crafts.
You can also subscribe individually to something like !upliftingnews@lemmy.world and have it show up in your Subscribed feed. I barely used the Subscribed feed in Lemmy as it didn't seem to offer much in comparison to either All or visiting specific communities that I wanted to go to, like !fedimemes@feddit.uk that regardless of how well it competes with the more popular meme communities, I still enjoy more. But on PieFed I use the Subscribed feed all the time, it works for me better there. Also I have notifications sent to me for the smaller communities that nonetheless have the primary content that I want like !tenforward@lemmy.world or !starwarsmemes@lemmy.world, though we saw earlier how Favorites or customized Categories will likely be coming in 2025 and that will be an even better way.
Right now some of the foundational aspects of PieFed suck, especially searching for content. Then again, Reddit's search sucks even harder so... how much will that matter to people? Tbf, Lemmy's search feature is nice, and I saw somewhere a plan to allow searching strictly for post titles rather than keywords in them - that effort is appreciated!
I hope that the code being written in Python will help it grow faster. You might ask Rimu about some of these ideas mentioned here like a Trusted and Hesitated set of instances, if showing the former and by default at least blocking the latter for new people or those without accounts would help allow a better glimpse into the Threadiverse (minus Threads).
Otherwise, if Admiral Patrick is willing to add this capability to Tesseract, then any instance willing to run that could gain that feature, though at the enormous cost that someone using an app would not be able to take advantage, I think? Btw did you see this post discussing adding Tesseract to sh.itjust.works?
The OP idea sounds really cool too, except it would require someone to do it, and also I thought there were some major administrative issues with defederating from lemmy.ml, particularly in relation to communities. But if jgrim and m_f are on board with that... then that sounds wonderful?
I do wonder how widespread the desire for it would be though. You and I might enjoy that, but how many others, really? Probably more than a few, but less than a lot? 😁
PieFed already does most of it.
Piefed's main obstacle to adoption is lack of mobile apps. I know Thunder is being forked, hopefully once that is done Piefed will get more adoption. In the meantime Lemmy is still the go-to platform.
it would require someone to do it,
If any smaller instance would do this, they would become my go-to suggestion everytime I talk about Lemmy on Reddit
do wonder how widespread the desire for it would be though.
Thousands of people dissatisfied with Reddit enshittification. Including your friends you couldn't recommend Lemmy to 😄
Once again I am astounded at mobile apps being the blocker. I use the Fediverse nearly exclusively from mobile on the browser and my experience is totally fine.
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The top reasons people avoid coming here iirc seemed like (a) "tankies", (b) lack of niche content (Reddit legit has more...), and iirc (c) toxic interactions (which, really, I personally think Reddit is far worse in this regard? probably the lowest end is the same across both Lemmy and Reddit, but the niche subs there are more chill, mostly, compared to like r/all; also if a right-wing person were to come here and act like a Redditor, then yeah they legit may feel unwelcomed!:-P).
Defederating with the big 3 would mostly take care of the first issue (though there's always more e.g. whenever a new person downvotes anything from the admin of Midwest.social and gets banned as a result they'll have to discover that whole thing on their own; there's only so much that can be done to create a walled garden effect). There's little that can be done about the second issue - although bringing people in is likely to help with that longer-term. And blocking the political communities including memes masquerading as such is likely to help with the toxicity effect, ofc there's always going to be people that refuse to control themselves and need to be blocked.
I agree, this looks interesting. It would require some effort. 💪
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Just join a catmeme instance and browse local, not all.
Slrpnk.net doesn’t have any politics on it. You can read about mushroom and collecting rainwater and recycling and never encounter anything polarising.
Edit :
The other thing, is that most of what passes for politics on Lemmy, is really just news and rage bait. Very few of the hundreds of submission about what Trump said or What China did, or what Pelosi think are political, they just amplify inflammatory messages
https://slrpnk.net/?dataType=Post&listingType=All&sort=TopDay
- Memes about Zuckerberg and Meta
- Screenshot about exploitation of people
- Drawing about fires and their monetization
- Comic about the military being a trap
- Comic with making the USA part of Denmark
- Meme about the fires
- Meme about people getting homeless after the fires
By browsing all, you will be limited to your instance, while most of the interesting communities (whatever your interests are) are on others.
In that case the other commenter is right - remove that and you have next to nothing.
But You either shield people , or you don’t . If people wants to explore annd find communities , surely they understand there will be some they like and some they don’t.
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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.
"Please introduce me to Marxism (and Marxist Lemmy)", but get this, from this URL: https://startrek.website/post/18021528.
That's the thing about how "federation" works -> it's their content, but unless a place is specifically added to a defederation list by name, it's also our content as well - in this case, Star.Trek.Website's content.
Here's another interesting proof of concept: the farewell message from a server that died 10 months ago, but their message is preserved on the internet forever for others to read, if you know how and where to look (this particular one took more than a little bit of digging to find).
You don't use All, but especially if you did just prior to an election - of pretty much any Western nation I would guess - oh the things that you would see....... yes, even from the Star Trek instance (Garak voice: especially from the Star Trek instance?:-P)
Like bOtH sIdEs SaMe
Important context here: the USA and Israel do genocide to Palestinians, whereas Russia does not do that to Ukrainians, China does not do that to Uyghurs, North Korea does not do that to its own people, etc. - just so you know. Ofc if you disagree, you will be banned from every community located on Lemmy.ml including those you've never even heard of, and in some cases reportedly without ever even interacting with that instance in the first place somehow, but based on a conversation elsewhere. Oh, but these rules aren't like, written down or anything helpful like that, no...
“Please introduce me to Marxism (and Marxist Lemmy)”, but get this, from this URL: https://startrek.website/post/18021528.
That’s the thing about how “federation” works -> it’s their content, but unless a place is specifically added to a defederation list by name, it’s also our content as well - in this case, Star.Trek.Website’s content.
Indeed, but: a) defederating the Three Big Bads would have stopped that coming through and b) that wouldn't appear in "Local" or "Subscribed" even if it is technically on your home instance.
Sorry, I must be too tired and focused on the "caveat" rather than the fact that we are in agreement on everything, so ofc in true Reddit style I had to write it as it I disagreed, I suppose? 🤡
I think I'm now obliged to disagree with you and my own previous stance. 🤪
Yes, but your message here is far too kind. Maybe throw in a KYS or best of all "well ackshually"... 🥴
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
By default new users could be sent to their Subscribed feed and see nothing, but then how do they know how to find content?
The keywords/categories is a nice idea (similar to what https://piefed.social/ does with its "topics"), but would require modifications to the Lemmyy codebase. The approach I suggested is doable with the tools we have now (defederation, community-blocking at instance level)
By default new users could be sent to their Subscribed feed and see nothing, but then how do they know how to find content?
the tags/categories I mentioned would do that. Nen users are supposed to know what they're interested in or what they're curious about so they would select those.
The approach I suggested is doable with the tools we have now (defederation, community-blocking at instance level)
I have little to no understanding of the technical considerations but I would think that if a technique involves defederation/blocking it also means it won't be bulletproof because, well, shit content does not always come from the same source(s).
it won’t be bulletproof because, well, shit content does not always come from the same source(s).
Indeed, but it would already be an improvement to what we have now, and we can try it today, without having to wait for someone to modify the Lemmy code to add tags/categories for new joiners
Oh, 100% agree here, just wanted to make sure I understand your suggestion well ;)
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.
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).
The issue is that requires development on Lemmy. The proposal in the OP can be done with the existing tools. Otherwise, I agree with you, what would be more elegant.
Not necessarily. Here is a discussion with a mod of sh.itjust.works who provided an alternate idea:
something like autoblocking the instance on user creation… which might make more sense than outright defederation. A bot could probably be made to do that and send them a DM with instructions on how to change it off they so wish.
Edit: it still would not block actual users from those instances though - only defederation, PieFed, or the Sync or Connect Lemmy apps can do that.
A bot could probably be made to do that and send them a DM with instructions on how to change it off they so wish.
Hasn't a bot have to be developed? 😄
I never saw an announcement to that effect, though I don't have an account on sh.itjust.works. Elsewhere in that thread other admins voiced strong support for Lemmy.ml so there may be quite strong push-back to such, even being easily reversible, even for strictly new accounts, even though it makes the issue opt-in rather than currently where the have to expend ENORMOUS efforts to opt-out. Also iirc the issue of site content warnings came up and took focus in the conversation to see how that might play out in the then-future.
People have been asking for such tools for 2 years now - here's a post from ml itself asking for finer-grained controls. And another that said not yet, but given all the things they listed seems like it would say the opposite today (e.g. suppression of anti-ccp views appearing on ml, which I suspect was happening even back then too).
Despite that, no major instance has wanted to separate itself from ml. This is their software, apparently it's their network too. We don't even have a name for the part of the Fediverse that isn't either Lemmy or the Threadiverse that would by definition include Meta's Threads (Mbin and PieFed are too small, and Sublinks non-existent yet). And a Google search of the word Lemmy pulls up ml as the first instance hit.
Ofc if we're changing that now, then I think that's awesome.
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Everythibg is inherently political. Plus people like politics or at least aggressively hating everyone else for what they like