Edit: the message can will be customizable by instance admins.
Here’s the proposal
- create a !newcomers@piefed.zip community (I just did: https://piefed.zip/c/newcomers)
- set up a weekly thread on that community so that new people can chime in and ask their questions
- have people answer their questions
The last point requires existing users to keep an eye on that community, would people here like to do that? You would mostly just need to subscribe to the community and have a look from time to time
Also, if you have a better name idea than “newjoiners”, feel free to suggest it
Piefed.zip was selected as the zip instances are known to be stable, and having it on a different instance than piefed.social can help the new joiners understand federation with a practical example
We do something similar in lemmy.dbzer0.com but we provide a list of comms relevant to the person, based on their application form. What would be useful is to allow the instance admins to select a bunch of topics for the user to opt-in as interested in. For each topic, the admins can specify a number of comms or comm groups to suggest.
So let’s say I am an instance admin. I provide Anarchism and ADHD as a possible interest options. If either of those are selected by the user, I suggest the following comms
- Anarchism
- ADHD
etc.
The feature here Blaze is discussing is a plugin to piefed rather than part of the base software. I wrote it that way in part to provide an example of what the plugin system could do so that others could use it as a model for their own as well as figuring out where some of the plugin pain points might be.
The system you are describing would work pretty similarly to this plugin, but instead of having a fixed list specified by the admin in advance, it would be dynamic based on the user’s registration application. So, instead of just parsing a
.tomlfile like this plugin does, you would first need to fetch the registration from the db and then parse that. It wouldn’t be that much different. I trust in your python skills :).Yeah fair enough. I didn’t know piefed got plugins. Very tempting
If you do ever work on it and run into issues, feel free to let me know. I added some hooks to piefed to make this one work.
I’ve been working on my own introduction guide for new users, so I’ll probably be disabling this feature if it comes about.
The feature here is actually a plugin to piefed. You can check out my repo for the plugin here. The intention is to help admins customize the new user experience in several ways (and also work with the plugin system a bit to test it out).
Oh well that’s piqued my interest greatly as I’ve been looking into making plugins lately. I might fork this.
Having a quick look, is the “onboard_user” hook related to what I was asking about the preset block for new accounts?
Right. The
new_userhook is fired when a new user is verified by piefed. So, a plugin can latch onto that to do things. The plugin has full access to all of piefed, so doing things like adding blocks for a new user is pretty simple. The default blocklists is covered by this plugin.Both you and piefed.zip were asking about it. So, I thought that I might as well put the plugin system through its paces to figure out more about it and fix pain points as I find them.
You will be able to customize the message sent on your instance, so this should still be helpful
Name could be: n00b, just joking ;)
I would join to help answer questions. I’m not sure about weekly, might be too late for newcomers to wait for a week.
The weekly post would always be pinned, people can ask questions there whenever they join
The post would be replaced weekly, but there would always be one available
Wdym by “wait”? Who would wait?
I’m happy to help with this Blaze, btw. As a mod of the comm. I’ve subscribed and follow new posts in it.
Thanks, I’ll make you a mod tomorrow!
Would new joiners understand the difference between piefed_help and newcomers? To most of them, the software is the platform.
Calling it something neutral allows to redirect other new joiners there too, from Lemmy/Mbin/whatever 4th option comes up in the future.
!ask@piefed.social is more future proof than the !asklemmy communities.
I think most likely only new piefed users would visit the community, unless Lemmy/Mbin etc add a similar message for onboarding as well.
I have enabled bell notification to the community, will try to help when I can.
Lemmy.zip has an automation that sends a DM to new joiners, maybe the admins will consider redirect to that community
I mean as long as we keep an eye on it we can direct them towards the right place if it’s a specific question. I see this as a general dynamics in the Threadiverse. We also have 10 different technology communities and even I don’t know in which to post. Some people just post 5 times and the only thing we agree on is to open more communities once there is an issue 😅. We usually just go with it. Guess it’s similar with newbies. They might not know whether they’d like to talk to the people on an instance, or the largest community, or the developers… They could be using an app and have questions about that. Or not even be aware if they’re on PieFed. There is the sidebar for additional information but other than that I don’t think there is an easy way to tell for new users.
The idea would be that new users would be directed to newcomers@piefed.zip whereas they aren’t for piefed_help.
That makes sense. Thanks.
