A well known feature from Reddit, default communities (subs on Reddit) are communities that newcomers are subscribed to by default. Lemmy, and specifically lemmy.world, could use some of these, I feel. At the very least, communities like lemmyworld, general, and newcomers are good ones to include, if we’re still somehow sticking with the old Lemmy ethos of less guided interaction. Aww, pics, videos, memes, news, etc, are good ones if not. This massively sped up the integration of new users on Reddit, and I believe it’s a good addition to Lemmy.
Added on to this is a capability that Reddit had and lemmy doesn’t yet, which is multi(reddits) communities, or Collections is probably what we’d call them here. I could see a ‘default’ collection being applied to new users, for example. The pie in the sky version of this would be publicly browsable and shareable collections, so you could send your friends a link which allows them to subscribe to multiple communities at once and create a new personal Collection automatically based on it.
You mean the model that is easier to understand and helps get users to stick around? Defaulting to some local only view would be terrible for retaining people who are seeing kbin or Lemmy for the first time. Depending on what instance they ended up on, they might mistakenly think that kbin/Lemmy doesn’t have much to offer or that it’s specialized.
I mean, how many actual users are viewing local only? I’m skeptical that many people would purposefully be doing that. So why would we make it the default?
(As an aside, for comparison, I believe kbin defaults to “all”, which is great for showing the breadth of posts, but shows too many niche things. The point of defaults is to try and make the default view more general as a starting point that applies to more people.)
You and I both know your average Redditor isn’t going to stumble upon exploding heads, dbzer0, or some other niche instance. They’re going to end up at lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, shitjustworks, or kbin.social. If they don’t like what they see on one of the generalized aggregators, then how would a “default community” view be any different?