Fediverse

When I'm scrolling any feed, whenever I see a post I don't want to see, I block that community or add a keyword to my filters.
So far I've blocked over a hundred communities and it's killed most of the adrenal rage-bait political posts that don't do anything other than rile me up. It's one thing to be aware of shitty things happening but it's another thing to doomscroll just for the adrenaline hit, and as a person with general anxiety I want to feel better after scrolling rather than worse

Hey, welcome back.

piefed.world hasn't really invested much into populating their Explore menu, to make finding communities easier.

I've just added a few feeds though, check out https://piefed.world/feeds

Also https://feddit.online/topics is an amazing directory of all the communities. It's a separate instance to piefed.world though so when you find good communities you'll need to manually copy their address into your piefed.world account. Or just move yourself to feddit.online...

Adding for context that one reason for this is that Lemmy was created by radical (to remain consensual) leftists, and the default instance (also maybe the first big one) they administrate Lemmy.ml (ML stands for Marxist-Leninist) has the same leaning population.
But, so far, afaik, the software itself is still neutral, so you can find instances and communities that fit your needs.
However, this initial leaning is still going to surface from time to time even after spending time blocking the instances and communities you don't want to see, as users can move around freely.

There are real people still on Reddit?

Shocking

Use block lists. I've blacklisted tons of keywords. Mostly political. If you're looking at an unfiltered feed then you're going to have a bad time.

I absolutely agree, I am also a leftist but constantly stewing in political news isn't good for your head, or even in a practical sense good for your ability to go actually get involved in stuff outside. You have to take care of yourself if you want emotional energy with which to do any real political labor

I wish we could come up with some collective strategy to create better balance cause this platform tends to share politics as common ground, and with not many people here that means a lot of what gets posted and engaged with is all just news and politics.

And yes, I know everything is political. AND, you need to be able to step away from the politics of the world and catch your breath and be mentally well. Any one thing dominating your time and emotional energy can become unhealthy quickly, especially when its all bad news or small victories that remind you of the broken bigger picture.

Balance is important. I'm thinking about creating a seperate account and blocking all the political communities and filtering by keywords so I can just be here for hobbies and folks chatting when I want that

Notice what instances those posts come from and block them... Notice what users seem to post politics wherever. Block them...

I'll often block lemmy.world, and unblock it when really bored.

Gotta curate your feed.

You just need a decent block/filter list. I scroll new/all and probably see 3-4 political posts daily.

I would be unable to use Lemmy/Piefed without a well-rounded block/filter list.

I've been blocking communities that post news. It's a bit of a heavy lift at first because there are quite a lot. But my all feed is now a fairly pleasant place and there's still a decent amount of content. I don't expect it'll be much effort to maintain, either.

To be fair the instance drama was unusually exciting in the fallout of the ban list.

But anyway. I got my ideal experience by joining .today, which doesn't block any instances, and only browsing my subscribed. It only took about an hour to get a solid list built up, one that I add to when I see things recommended or in the community promo groups. The front page of my feed is usually memes, comics, art and tech news.

What kind of posts are you looking for?

Because the upvotes are controlling what people want.

Some instances do curate the default communities. Programming.dev hides a number of communities by default:

https://legal.programming.dev/docs/hidden-communities/

Other instances may have similar policies.

Since I signed up to Lemmy I think I've spent about 30 minutes in the All feed. 5 minutes just now to remind me why I don't go there. You are your own algorithm. If all you subscribe to are meme communities, you ought to be able to drastically reduce political content in your personal feed. All and Local are for occasional excursions only.

If you want to make this place a bit less stressful, the most surefire way is to contribute the kind of content you'd rather see more of! Be the change that you want to see in the world, as they say.

Lemmy is not the fediverse just part of it

Did you look at the all feed on reddit? If so there is no help for you anywhere, you make your own choices.

If I could block the usa on here, would I still see posts from people crying about left, leftist, leftism? Awfully ironic from a country where 1% of the people even vote left, let alone know what it is.

i tend to stick to subscribed unless i want to read the worst opinions available

Yeah, I get it, I wish more people used lemmy and that there is more apolitical stuff on here

Listen I have left leaning politics but does every other post have to be about some political shit on the all tab,

Just every other? You must've spent quite some time filtering shit already, then.

You see, if you don't like all the ragebait you are No True Leftist. Disagree with anyone at any time? Gotta hand that card in, bro, 'cause you've got to be some fascist or something. Or "shitlib" or whatever cringe terminology the tankies use. This may come as a shock to you but at least Random Angry Dipshit was kind enough to inform you about your entire political stance that you thought was something radically different. Neat trick, right? Aren't you grateful? I know I am.

I feel like I’m forced into this box that is my subscribed feed or I have to actively search out new communities because all is just a political circle jerk that I don’t care about.

Correct! It's also an unappealing and rather significant workload trying to find real activity on real communities on here to subscribe to, so /all is kinda it. Discoverability is garbage, one of many upshots of the way the federation gimmick was implemented.

Not to mention the moment I came back I saw a fucking flow chart on the instances drama of the week. If I wasn’t so dedicated to dropping Reddit I think the average Joe would have left by now seeing all of this.

I'm sure they mostly do, if they ever even learn of this place at all. That's why it keeps being like this. Parts of the fedv are indistinguishable from satire or outright trolling - that's not counting explicitly blatant troll instances like ml, gr*d and hb. I'd seriously thought some of the leftist infighting meme was... y'know, a meme.... Or that "here, I disagree with this one thing you said and now you're banned from X communities", from people who spent the last sentence whining about Reddit moderators. (They are right in isolation, just big blubbering hypocrites.)

I’m not saying there ISNT other type of content on lemmy or piefed it just feels like the stuff that floats to the top is political

Engagementbait on a platform that isn't even pushing "the algorithm" that way. Nifty, right?

It's not going to change, or even get any less of a pain to try to curate unless tooling gets better. It won't, because the Lemmy devs at least are tankie idiots who have no interest in making anything easy to curate (because then, the very first thing to go is their main shitholes for being blatant assholes to everyone except dictators)

Edit: on that note, instance blocks on ml, gr*d and hb are an absolute must