I hope this is a good place for this. A few weeks ago I started a simple experiment: Block every community in the All feed that is about the US election in some way.
I thought this up after a thread about the Biden debate, as someone kindly (not really kindly) informed me that I should curate my own experience here. I thought about it and realized just how much election/politics stuff there is on the front page. It was quite hard blocking communities I like, especially 196 on blahaj.
Now the quality of my feed did go up in some ways but it’s very slow. I also realized that I am feeling a lot less rage/anger than before when scrolling lemmy. I didn’t even realize how much the constant political stuff from another continent affected me…
What is your opinion on this? Is Lemmy really filled with too much US political rage bait? Should I continue with my zero tolerance policy?
It would also interest me to hear an American perspective. Is there more or less politics here, on other platforms or real life. How does rage/hate affect you when scrolling through Lemmy and does it take a toll?
It’s just party of American life. You learn to get used to it.
This reminds of the song Amerika from Rammstein.
To bad there isn’t an easier way to filter out posts without having to block entire communities. It seems the election has infiltrated all of them. I can understand how frustrating that must be for nonAmericans. An option to leave out posts that contain keywords would be useful. I use it a lot when doing a Google search.
Most lemmy apps will allow filtering of keywords. Personally i use Connect.
TIL, thanks!
as someone kindly (not really kindly) informed me that I should curate my own experience here.
Delivery of the message notwithstanding, definitely do curate. It takes weeks whittle All down to only topics that interest you, but tackle it one community at a time and you’ll get there. All is about the only thing I browse now - I’ve blocked a TON of communities that don’t interest me, and the experience now if much, MUCH better.
I strongly recommend also using a key word filter - many of Lemmy’s apps have this feature, and IIRC there’s a “RES” of Lemmy floating around the web somewhere, but I neglected to bookmark it and don’t remember what it’s called -_- …if you happen to know what I’m talking about, please drop a link!
Anywho, if you’re tired of US politics in your Lemmy, chop it!
Me just browsing /all/
It is time to take refuge in the Subscribed tab of your Lemmy app or choice
I’ve been blocking channels and users left and right (no pun intended). Most of the time it’s just bots arguing with bots anyways.
How dare you say I’m arguing with
otherbots.On the Internet nobody knows you’re a
dogbot.01000101 01110010 01110010 01101111 01110010 00111010 00100000 01101001 01101110 01110000 01110101 01110100 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01110010 01100101 01100011 01101111 01100111 01101110 01101001 01111010 01100101 01100100 00101110 00100000 00100000 01010111 01101111 01101111 01100110 00101110 00100000
I have the keywords politics, trump, Biden, Harris, Republican, Democrat, Israel, Palestine, and a bunch of other shit blocked, and I still see way more of it than I’d like. The amount of political content is fucking staggering, and you cannot block it all. I know, I’ve been trying for a year now.
I filter out anything that makes me angry with voyager, still needs some added terms, but my feed barely has US politics in it, the odd one slips through, also ticking that box in the Lemmy website settings to block bots makes a difference.
Same with me but on Connect. I can still use All and discover new stuff easily by being ruthless with blocking. I have several hundred blocked communities and use the keyword filters for major us politicians and such.
If there is someone who posts US politics in a general sub I just block the user.
I know I’m throwing some good out with bad but thems the breaks.
Another poster suggested Piefed, tried it and even without an account much better. With an account, it’s supposed to have keyword filters.
Lemmy made by people who don’t wsnt filters.
block the words elon musk, donald trump, kamala harris, republicans, democrats.
i did it for the longest time.
How do I do this?
Use Voyager, Connect or Sync
i can confirm voyager
Instead of outright blocking communities you enjoyed you could try using keyword filters instead
How do I do that for mobile?
Sync should have the option in the settings
Hmmm but what about all the image memes?
It’s not perfect but gets like 98% of em
It is very US politics heavy. And for many people, that is understandably tedious.
We also don’t have a large enough user base to fill out the niche communities, which is creating a lot of little voids that feels like one big void.
IMO, a very noticeable percentage of our users are also arrogant jerks. The kind of users who only reply with snark or criticism, and never add anything positive. You look at their history, and its just comment after comment crapping on others. I have blocked several of these sniping assholes.
The jerks aren’t surprising. Guessing many are jerks who got banned over on reddit, so they feel like Dennis Reynolds unleashed over here. A crowd like that can scare people off, though. Social media has a known problem of filtering assholes in instead of out.
Fortunately, there are enough decent people that I still have hope that Lemmy is not a lost cause. It’s slowly growing, and some of the new people are pitching in and posting useful / interesting things. Reddit will continue to get worse with its unhinged greed and exploitation. So I hope for future influxes of more people.
I am definitely on the hope side of things. Lemmy has extreme potential for growth. Just not explosive fast growth. I believe the strength of Lemmy could be “natural” growth as the threat of the platform going downhill is smaller.
Well said, and it is Lemmy’s greatest strength. Hopefully the devs can implement some kind of automated instance replication, or mirroring, or migration…for those scenarios where a beleaguered admin wants out.
Being able to host the same community over multiple servers would be great. Or having the same account on multiple servers. And I’m not talking about subscriptions but upvotes, posts, comments. That stuff is afaik not transferrable at the moment.
Right now I lost all my posts and comments when feddit.de went kaputt.
Massively importing huge amount of data could be a security issue. Mastodon doesn’t do it either
Mastodon currently does not support importing posts or media due to technical limitations
IMO, a very noticeable percentage of our users are also arrogant jerks. The kind of users who only reply with snark or criticism, and never add anything positive. You look at their history, and its just comment after comment crapping on others. I have blocked several of these sniping assholes.
Unfortunately, that’s correct
Spez in sunglasses and hat.
I have been here for a year and I’ve only run into a couple assholes. I get more upvotes and good comment replies here than I ever did on Reddit. Maybe it’s the communities I’m subscribed to, or maybe I’m being more choosy with what I comment on, but regardless I enjoy my interactions on Lemmy significantly more than other social media / link aggregators.
Oh, I have a similar experience, but there are still a few unpleasant people
I hope Lemmy continues to grow as other sites keep getting worse. That will probably help round out the content. I’m only too well aware of how widespread American politics is as I have dealt with it my whole American life. I don’t blame you for avoiding it, and have only started recently engaging with it. Though, compared to other social media, I find Lemmy to be more mild in the intensity and range being pushed around the site. I expect it will increase over the next few months. As for advice, if it makes you angry/upset, then yeah, keep political instances blocked. I learned how to ignore it, but that took time. 196 is still pretty great tho. Hope you find your peace and enjoyment from the community. Ask more questions, and you’ll probably find what you’re looking for.
Nooo keep them where they are we dont need enshittification on lemmy.
each community also has an RSS feed
I took a two week break from Lemmy and other engagement sources and it did wonders for my mental health. I’d recommend trying something similar.
Yea that can’t hurt. It’s just hard to do IMHO a lot of muscle memory.
For me, even just making the switch from Reddit to Lemmy has done quite a lot for mental health and really helped reshape my social media diet into something much better.
On Lemmy I encounter a lot fewer true assholes on the platform (theres still snark and sarcasm and inside jokes, but I liked that aspect of reddit), it’s a lot slower of stream of content, the posts take longer to change so I don’t get stuck in an infinite scroll of perpetually new content, and I’ve rebalanced where I’m spending my time online, more informational and wholesome side of youtube and a discord community that I found that I really like.
But yeah even taking a break from these every so often is still a good idea.
Communities should have tags or something that I can just filter out of my feed
Voyager and Connect allow to filter keywords
