It seems like no matter how I scroll I find bad news. I know lots of things are happening but I just want funny memes and interesting stories.
I used to be able to get this back in the day on the Reddit app feed, but here the all page is always just depressing stuff. Back then, there was news and stuff but like it felt more balanced in the all feed. I could get bad stuff but lots of interesting stuff too .
I find myself engaging less and less and just avoiding Lemmy more and more since I know the moment I open it I’ll get whacked with more depressing stuffs.
I don’t want politics or world news or really even memes about that stuff anymore. Heck even tech news is depressing. I just want simple scrolling of fun content. Idk it’s just hard to describe.
Does anyone else feel this way about their Lemmy experience?
I remember an old post about someone getting AM radio from their sink (probably from Reddit back in the day). That type of stuff is so much cooler than my feed.
To that end: any recommended active communities on Lemmy with that type of stuff?
Does anyone else feel this way about their Lemmy experience?
The out of the box experience is not great (neither is Reddit, if you’re asking me, it’s at least as depressing to see the amount of trash/low effort posts on their home page). But once I switched to ‘Subscribed’ only view, things were already much better since I was only seeing content I was interested in (aka no politics or drama of any sort).
As already suggested: !newcommunities@lemmy.world is good place to see what’s new, also there is !communitypromo@lemmy.ca
Most importantly, Lemmy is not Reddit for many reasons but this one is more directly related to your question: it’s much smaller (to give you an idea, I moderate a journaling community we recently reached… 300 members (of which less than a handful is active), whereas the Reddit journaling community is 2 Million+ ;). So, there is a lot less content posted on Lemmy. Back on Reddit, I was mostly a commenter (barely posting anything new myself) but I quickly realized that if I wanted to see stuff I was interested in on Lemmy I better start… posting myself ;)
[user banned for having an opinion that diverges from the group]
[user banned for having an opinion that diverges from the group]
Is this something I’m supposed to react to? If so, sorry I don’t get it.
It’s just a bad joke about ‘the out of the box experience not being great’.
My bad. I should have understood. Even I, filtering out all the crap, have heard of that, well, that situation ;)
Did you subscribe to news and politics communities? I’d recommend to unsubscribe, then. The more you tailor your feed to your interests, the more you’re going to get what you’re looking for.
In your Lemmy account settings, set your default feed to ‘subscribed’ instead of ‘all’.
When you open the app or log in on your browser you will only see communities you’ve subscribed to.
It will greatly improve your (and everyone else’s) experience if you subscribe to positive communties and participate in them.
If you’re into crosswords and word games, there are !crossword@lemmy.world, !nytconnections@lemmy.world, !dailygames@lemmy.zip
I use voyager and block words phrases and instances that bring that stuff up. And sometimes users who repeatedly do it too.
I’m also on Lemmy blahaj which don’t know if that matters. But over time I rarely have a lot of depressing political things in my feed anymore. Just every so often.
I have another account on Lemmy world for political things already I rarely use it.
I’m also on Lemmy blahaj which don’t know if that matters
It does. If your home instance blocks other instances then you’ll never see their posts, regardless of your settings.
I don’t believe there’s a native way to see these blocks in Lemmy, you’d have to look at a third party site that tracks that sort of thing.
If your instance blocks other instances, they are listed on the “blocked” tab of the Instances page (the link is in the footer).
E.g. for lemmy.world https://lemmy.world/instances
Remember that spam instances are a thing, and are often what is being blocked by admins.
Have you considered halting the decline of democracy? Then people won’t post depressing facts.
Or you filter by keywords. One of the two things needs to happen for you not to be exposed to negativity.
Not all of us live in the US.
You are 100% correct, negative news has a greater impact on people than positive: https://assets.csom.umn.edu/assets/71516.pdf
Media sites know this, and use it to drive engagement:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01538-4 https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/social-media-facebook-twitter-politics-b1870628.html
And so, negative headlines are getting worse: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0276367
But negative news is addictive and psychologically damaging: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/why-we-worry/202009/the-psychological-impact-negative-news
So it’s important to try and stay positive:
https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/benefits-of-good-news
If you want a break from the constant negativity, here are some sites that report specifically on positive news:
- https://www.goodgoodgood.co/
- https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/
- https://fixthenews.com/
- https://positivenewsfoundation.org/
- https://www.onlygoodnewsdaily.com/
And here’s 35 more: https://news.feedspot.com/good_news_websites/
Some communities on Lemmy you might be interested in:
- !goodnews@kbin.social
- !lemmybewholesome@lemmy.world
- !goodnewseveryone@sh.itjust.works
- !upliftingnews@lemmy.world
- https://lemmy.world/c/hopeposting
- https://lemmy.world/c/worldinprogress
- https://lemmy.world/c/climatehope
Remember, realistic optimism is important and, unlike what some might have you believe, is not the same as blissful ignorance or ‘burying your head in the sand’: https://www.learning-mind.com/realistic-optimism-blind-positivity/
https://www.centreforoptimism.com/realisticoptimism
And doesn’t mean you must stay uninformed on current affairs: https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/how-to-stop-doom-scrolling
https://goodable.co/blog/tips-for-balancing-positive-and-negative-news/
kbin.social is dead btw… if you post there it won’t federate and only people on your instance will see your post.
Noted, thanks
Yeah lemmy has bit too much political content. Americans seem very obsessed with it. I just kept blocking all of them and now my feed is pretty free of political nonsense. If I want that kind of content i’ll just read the news paper or go to my news feed of choice
To be fair, a large slice of the user base is in the US and currently everything is collapsing around us. It should come as no surprise that we complain about it a lot. The mods of various communities could certainly enforce rules more; e.g. in shitposting or memes, remove any political content. It would help the situation.
Lol than your country has been collapsing for the last 2+ years, cus it’s always dominated by politics on lemmy.
It’s a difficult balance to strike, since enforcing content also feels like going against the foss ethos… It’s tricky. But just keep promoting Lemmy and the fediverse and some day we will have a more balanced experience
I agree. And yes, the last 2+ years have been a political shit show, because we were scared shitless of what has now happened.
Unfortunately there’s almost nothing left once you’ve blocked all that. I’m close to leaving. No one will miss me, whatever. Occasionally I have a nice interaction though.
Won’t argue with that, 70% is Linux and Politics combined. I do enjoy the “small scale forum” feel, but indeed after scrolling for 30 minutes you will probaly have consumed most of the content for the coming 48hours. After that, shamefully admitting, it’s back to reddit and tiktok.
I’ve been using as an impetus to pick up a book instead, or do something constructive. I get my shot of dopamine, but since it has an end I am forced to do other things.
I’m in the same place. Avoiding politics is not only for my mental health.
In my case, for personal as well as professional reasons, I particularly need to avoid communities where advocating for political violence is tolerated (and in some even condoned.)
I blocked all the politics-specific or adjacent communities, but most of Lemmy seems to want everything to be about politics.
That’s way too toxic for me so I have to detach from Lemmy. I deleted my main account and I’m going to come back in a few months to see if it has calmed down.
Use an alternative front-end like Tesseract to filter out specific words on desktop. For mobile, you can use e.g. Voyager or Interstellar to filter out specific words. Unfollow news and politics communities.
That sounds like a lot of filter words. Thanks for the suggestion though!
I’ve found that there’s a few common themes to the posts that pop up… not that many. I have like 10-15 at most.
Most of political posts are about the US so with only a few keywords you can filter out 80% of the shit news (mine are Trump, Musk, Democrat, Republican).
Then you add some if you want (Israel ? Palestine ? Russia ? Or some of your country specific themes)
The only problem is that if the words are on an image and not title it won’t be filtered. But you can fine tune your blacklist with time by blocking url, users, communities and instances.
That + mostly browsing by subscribed made my lemmy the perfect happy bubble.
Great advice. I’ll add a Pro tip: users who post in ways that get around filters - such as pure image posts of text without alternative text - tend to be the same few users. I find that blocking just a few users completely cleaned my feed. They’re a minority of users, but they tend to post a lot.
20 active communities which are not politics, news, memes or tech
For anyone on dbzer0, or who already have link redirection set up: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/35001146
You can block alot of political content pretty easily through an inbuilt function
Some days I just go and block all political and general news communities I see. I usually unblock a few some days later.
I’ve taken a bit of a different approach. I’ve been using a keyword filter to remove posts that contain any words I don’t care to read about. So no posts about trump, Elon, RFK, cyber trucks, etc.
I am not here to get that kind of news, I do that separately with the news sources I can trust and verify. Otherwise any tabloid or sensational opinion piece can potentially try to ruin my day all in the name of getting clicks
This is the way. I blocked keywords relating to Trump, Musk and the far right extremist party in my own country the other day and while some stuff still gets through it has made Lemmy significantly more pleasant to browse.
I can read about that stuff elsewhere if I really want to, but honestly I think we might not even be in this mess if the media didn’t amplify those voices every time they said or did something outrageous.
I implemented the filters using the Voyager app, but I think most Lemmy clients have similar options. On desktop my instance offers Tesseract which also allows filtering by keywords.
I do think it’s important to keep up to date. Even discounting the things I can’t control getting through my filters, there have been things that have directly affected my family and their jobs because of things Trump has done and I did not know about until after the fact. There is a line somewhere that you should be aware of, or else you may just be burying your head in the sand.
Separately, I use boost for Lemmy on android. Thank you for telling me about tesseract. I haven’t been as successful with any keyword filters in browser
Voyager also has a web app interface that has keyword filtering which works well for me. https://vger.app/
Step 1: don’t browse the All feed. I dunno how Reddit was okay for you, visiting r/all was always full of Trump this Trump that every 5 minutes.
At least Reddit had a nice feature where you could filter out up to 100 communities from r/all. I could still get a varied experience while not having to look at things like politics, sportsball, or games I didn’t care for.
Make a community, specify no politics in the rules? Heck, this community excludes US politics in the rules.
And yet somehow we have questions that revolve around US politics geopolitical depressants.
You should definitely report any posts that break the community’s rules
You can report them, they get removed
