What does the kbin community think about having new user accounts subscribed to some set of default communities to get them started and show how the platform works? Rather than starting from ground 0, users can have ~20-30 communities and then add/remove from there. Similar to how Reddit has default subreddits or MySpace had everyone friends with Tom.
Not only would it help grow fledgling communities, but it would also help showcase federation if we included some of the Lemmy or Mastadon sites as well.
Just a small example list:
- Technology: https://beehaw.org/c/technology
- Mildly Infuriating: https://lemmy.world/c/mildlyinfuriating
- Mastadon Updates: https://mastodon.social/@Mastodon
- Gaming: https://kbin.social/m/gaming
- Science https://kbin.social/m/science
While I’m not advocating those all be defaults, if every user new user received the same “federated start communities” it shows how kbin interact with these other platforms and helps grow the entire fediverse.
I’m just one kbin user, so what does everyone else think?
To my perspective, that was one of the worst aspects of reddit. Many people do not realize they can (and should, IMHO) unsubscribe from all of those defaults, and then subscribe to topics they actually care about. When you start with zero subscriptions, it immediately teaches new users to search magazines and customize their feeds.
Great idea as far as I’m concerned.
I was super annoyed when I joined reddit only to have to take on the chore of unsubbing every single “default” sub so that I could populate my feed with what I actually wanted to read about instead. Maybe I’m Spiders Georg, but I really don’t like it when a website tries to decide for me what I want to partake in. It’s better to start with a clean slate you can manage yourself – then you learn how to explore the site, how to use the site, how to engage in the site, at your own pace. When the site tries to force your engagement, it makes it more difficult to learn how to use the site (in my experience, anyway). :V
I like that idea, but I disagree with the idea of having external communities as default. If the list is for kbin.social members, have the default mags only be ones on kbin.social.
I was going to suggest a “featured” page for magazines, so the site admin can give a list of magazines that e.g. suit the theme of the site on a page. Perhaps a “featured” tab on the “All magazines” page?
