Whenever barrier to entry is discussed for lemmy, and reducing confusion for different servers is brought up, all of the isolationist comments come out of the woodwork.

Apparently redditors who are too dumb to register should stay on reddit?

We have a platform that seems to be working and slowly growing. Shouldnt we want good defaults in place to give the best possible experience with minimal user effort?

  • @SamboTOP
    8•2 days ago

    I dont understand whats different about starting from nothing and curating your feeds… versus starting from a good default and curating your feeds.

    “Professional users” can disable or customize however they want. And it seems like a new user thing anyways… where established users wouldnt even notice a difference.

    Its literally just a more compelling starting point.

    I think proving that we dont need to be big commercial platform to be a big platform is an important milestone for foss. Big platforms should appeal to the masses. Any instance that wants to break off is obviously fine but when we are talking about the popular entry points to lemmy… thats where we should not be elitest.

    Thanks for your comment.

    • hendrikEnglish
      6•2 days ago

      Hmmh, I don’t think it’s even elitism in this case. Feels to me like something else. But I’m the wrong person to ask, since I do not share that opinion.

      I think your proposal with default subscriptions (or whatever it is exactly) is a solid idea, though. In fact, I’ve heard some people scroll through the “All” feed here on Lemmy and subsequently block the things they’re not interested in. I’d say that’s about the same direction. And I mean why not? We also have sorting by popular, and things are popular for a reason. So we might as well subscribe new users to the 10 most popular communities.

      It’s a bit more complicated than just that, we’d have to take some care not to entirely destroy diversity and pour some cement over the whole thing, or we end up with a small echo chamber of just lemmy.world and AskLemmy and NoStupidQuestions… But I guess there might be some solution in beween the extremes. And things might change due to the size of the platform. An “All” feed might still be useful at our current size, but might prove to become infeasable once we grow.