Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
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I don't block entire instances, but I block every single community I'm not interested in - which probably adds up to over 500 by now. I tried blocking all the mean or extremist users, but that ended up completely killing my feed, since that seems to be about 80% of active commenters. So nowadays, I use content filters to screen for keywords in comments and posts. My list of keywords is quite substantial and keeps growing every week. At this point, I'd say about 50% of the threads on my homepage get filtered out. While I can’t know exactly how many comments are being hidden, I’d imagine it’s about the same.
Funnily enough, even after all that filtering, a significant portion of what still gets through is full of mean, snide remarks, tribalism, toxicity, negativity, doomerism, hopelessness, and that classic crabs-in-a-bucket mentality. A smart person would probably just give up and bail - but I guess I’m not that smart.
I have stopped using the "All" feed for that reason, it's best to find communities that you're interested in and only look at those in my experience. Finding them without the All feed is the challenge though. I've found Lemmy to be quite nice when it was new, but it seems this is the way all communities go when they reach a certain size.
If everywhere you go smells like shit, it might be time to check your own shoes.
As if a smug metaphor, delivered in the exact same dismissive tone I was criticizing is supposed to prove me wrong.