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?
Yeah, I had to step away from Lemmy for a while because I was feeling too doomer these days. I need to go sub to more comms I like and use the filter on my app, but I just haven’t yet. For now, I’ve switched to Loops to get my serotonin hit.
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
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.
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.
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.
On mastodon, I used word filters when my feed would be poisoned. Here on Lemmy these do not exist, I believe?
Otherwise I could e.g. block words like Trump and Musk, and only allow them in certain communities. That would make the experience possibly more nice.
I had to move from the mobile web page to an app to get key word filtering.
I read there’s an extension or something for word filters or you can use an app.
You can block alot of political content pretty easily through an inbuilt function
Yes, gtfo out of Lemmy. It’s Twitter but for leftists.
Block Lemmy.ml, hexbear, and dbzer0, then make your own list of keywords to block (Trump, Elon, murder, angry, etc etc)
You can block keywords? I just see communities, users, and instances in my block settings.
Some of the apps add this as a feature client side. For example I know sync has this. Not aware of it on the web site though.
Yep, my block list is long. It’s updated occasionally. I call it “weeding the digital garden”. Negatively sprouts everywhere and it’s imperative to cull it asap.
The way I see it there’s far too many things in the digital world to care about, so I just care about basically none of them. I’d rather spend energy loving the people I love than being angry at what I see on the internet.
The internet is full of slacktivism and I find it’s more worthwhile to do something good rather than critiquing the bad and doing nothing.
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
I filter out a bunch of words too…but it doesn’t work when people have generic titles. Half the meme communities are nothing but political slop despite (some of) their rules saying otherwise.
If Lemmy implemented tags like red had, then we can start flagging stuff so people can filter it.
If you’re into crosswords and word games, there are !crossword@lemmy.world, !nytconnections@lemmy.world, !dailygames@lemmy.zip
I think places like Lemmy are better suited for discussions and ofc ongoing events and politics are a huge part of that.
Have you tried 9gag and other more “lightweight” and meme oriented platforms?
This seems really pedantic. Recommending 9gag because someone does not want to see constant bad news is just a but out there.
Same as reddit: Subscribe to communities you like then only look at those.
Yes and no, since lemmy has a smaller user base certain type of content will have a much higher presence than reddit. And when 5 instances are all posting from the same source, that will saturate the platform.
If every new user immediately gets turned off by it, because curating your homepage is like step 2, then lemmy will continue struggling with retaining new users.
Lemmy doesn’t really have enough users for the same type of mindless only scrolling in communities you like from what I’ve seen. On reddit I’m subscribed to 2 drama subs Gentoo sub and a few others. There is enough content in that for me to just scroll that instead of all.
on the other hand here I find my subscriptions literally don’t get new posts. It’s fine I’m getting used to it but it means I’m using the all equivalent far more often.
Yeah it’s a shame. I still like it better than reddit but damn. Civilization 7 is coming out in a few days and I haven’t seen a single post.
Make one! I’m sure you’re not the only one here anticipating it. !games@sh.it.ust.works
Edit:fixed link
I use all a lot too but I still curate my subscriptions when I want a calmer experience (500+ subscriptions mind).
One trick is to sometimes sort by scaled which allows posts from less active communities to rise
I mainly browse through home page subscriptions. Occasionally I venture to all to find new subs, but I have a lot of subs blocked and keywords blocked for when I do.
