Default multi-community for new instances

[Nutomic]

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/5601 adds a field local_site.suggested_communities which refers to a multi-community that gets shown on the homepage next to Subscribed/Local/All. It is meant for instance admins to suggest communities to new users (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5340). In the same way we can provide a default value here which is used for newly installed Lemmy instances, and instances upgraded from previous versions.

This default multi-community should serve as a starting point for new instance admins and for users on smaller instances where the admin doesnt maintain specific community suggestions. It should contain a variety of communities, including [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], memes, news, discussions etc.

We need to ensure that this multi-comm with some posts is shown immediately after completing setup on a newly installed instance. This will also help with https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2951.

[asudox]

So the default multi-community will be hardcoded? That doesn't seem like a good idea.

[dessalines]

Not hard-coded (as in a config file), but in the DB: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/5601/files#diff-8028f525f15ed3a5ec1b2abc67bb46906a005a0e11f0d3f5daf6ea7742235ef9R34

This means that admins can choose a given multicommunity as the default list of suggested ones. Any admin can change that live.

[dessalines]

I believe this is finished now by #5601

[Nutomic]

#5601 fixes https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5340 which allows instance admins to specify a suggested multi-community (local_site.suggested_communities) which will be shown on the homepage next to Subscribed / Local / All tabs. However this suggestion is empty on a new Lemmy install. This issue is about creating a multi-community on lemmy.ml which is used as default value for local_site.suggested_communities on new installs.

[dessalines]

I wouldn't be opposed to this, but I have a feeling that baking in a set of suggested multi-communities, that we define, would be seen as favoritism, especially if a lot of those communities are from lemmy.ml, or there aren't enough communities from a diverse set of instances. I don't see any way this could please everyone.

If we limit it to announcements, support, and onboarding, and no news or meme communities, then it might be okay.

[Nutomic]

Yes that makes sense. I would suggest the following communities:

• [email protected]
• [email protected] (or [email protected], they are both similar)
• [email protected] where new users can get help
• [email protected], [email protected] or something similar to discover interesting communities

In any case this is mainly meant for admins of newly installed Lemmy instances, so they arent completely empty after setup. All the larger instances would quickly configure their own suggestions anyway.

[dessalines]

This might need to come after the 1.0 release, since the multi-community on lemmy.ml with these communities won't even exist until then.

[Nutomic]

We are going to run beta versions on lemmy.ml for a while before the final release.

[Nutomic]

This is not necessary anymore as https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/6077 solves it in a slighty different way. When a new instance is created, it fetches the top 100 communities from lemmyverse.net, and creates a welcome post with some information.