Fediverse

Delete the All feed! It's just stupid. Subscribe to what you like. Maybe have a short glimpse at the All feed on a biweekly basis for 5min, but that's it.

I did a couple things to make my life comfy here.

I changed my default sort to be "new comments" - this gave me the biggest perspective change on Lemmy, I now see where the active conversations are and it makes the place feel more full of people and less pages and pages of empty threads. I also found a lot less political stuff this way, because it gets posted a lot but people only interact with just a few of the political posts, so only those one end up floating to the top. I am finding myself getting less politics this way on Lemmy than I was on reddit. Also has the added bonus of highlighting where the active communities are.

I blocked Lemmy.ml and hexbear. A lot of the wilder leftist stuff comes from them and once it was blocked I saw the amount of politics in my feed drop right away.

I believe you're somehow subsconciously expecting an algorithm to curate your feed.

On Lemmy that work is on you.

Block users that seem extreme and it will clear up. Its like 10 people responsible for 95% of the posts.

Yeah, no matter your political leanings, you gotta approach the fediverse in reverse of the way reddit worked. Reddit, you went and subbed to the things you were interested in and only went to the all feed if you wanted random discovert.

With lemmy, piefed and mbin (or kbin, whichever is still in use), you have to default to the all feed because there's only so much activity per community, which means discovery is much harder and your subscribed feed takes months sometimes to get filled in with useful things. It's more efficient and enjoyable to spend the time pruning out the non enjoyed stuff from the all feed so that you have access to more things overall.

That's helped by app that have filters. You can weed out a lot of bullshit just with keywords preventing specific topics coming up even in communities you are in.

The fediverse is more work on the user's part to make work. I don't consider that a bad thing overall, but it does make it hard for ex redditors (aka r/effugees) to on board, and can be confusing for total newcomers to threaded forums.

Tbh though, ten plus years ago, the initial reddit experience for a noob there was worse in many ways. Hell, outright hostile at times, if you were a noob that dared speak your mind against the zeitgeist of a given sub. At least here, you usually only run into that if you're not fairly solidly leftist, or try to hate on linux. That's much easier to deal with imo.

I have always felt surrounded by right wing bullshit, on previous socials and in life.

This is the only place where I look around, and believe that it is people further to the left of me that are maybe taking things a bit far. I do NOT, for the record, agree with the apologists who want us to let more fash in, I like being in a place where I am, for once, the moderate.

but does every other post have to be about some political shit on the all tab,

There's a reason it's called the "All" tab and not the "Some" tab, and even then it's mostly making an effort.

The fediverse stuff is already set on the tooling for that. Set your feed view away from All to, say, Subscribed, and block the stuff you don't like.

There's also no curated algorithm to cause that dopamine rush, that causes the addiction, so you want to scroll and hit those juicy dopamine posts, but without the manipulation designed to keep you engaged and stuck, not going to happen. So it's also a great place to detox from your brain being in the habit of seeking dopamine that way, it's like a slow lowering to the ground, instead of cold turkey.

I was really feeling the loss of those dopamine hits, when I first transitioned over here, but now I don't look for those hits here at all, and I can just enjoy a small scroll, without getting stuck in here, and put my phone down, which is nice.

What reddit and Facebook do, is hugely manipulative and created and curated to trap you there. I don't know if that needs to be the same here, as much. And maybe curating your home page, really is the way to go.

I'm just blocking all political/news communities on sight. It's helped a lot.

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...

Yeah, the only way to enjoy lemmy is heavily, heavily curated. My community blocklist has over 300 entries these days ...

I feel like I’m forced into this box that is my subscribed feed or I have to actively search out new communities

I don't feel that this is a problem. I don't ever use the All feed, because I specifically don't want to see all. There's a lot of garbage I don't care about out there.

I have been trying to be the change I want to see if you check my profile I regularly post in meme subs non political just funny memes to be like “lmao”

This is... a weird change you'd want to see. Usually people want to see more signal and less noise.

You curate the content you see on your own, doesn't have to be political if you don't want to.

I suggest to use https://lemmyverse.net/ to find communities you like and keep the feed to subscribed, so you see them and them only.

this way, Lemmy is actually good, no algorithm, I choose what to see and that's a beautiful thing.

What you're missing is the algorithm.

You didn't want to see that on Reddit, and it's designed to steer away. Lemmy doesn't decide what you see. You have to curate your own feed through a long process of blocking users and communities and using subscribe rather than a steady diet of all.

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.

Politics is kinda the default for lemmy.world, lemmy.hexbear, and lemmy.ml. If you don't want politics, join an alternate server rather than .world. Or, alternatively, start curating your list of communities to block the comms channels that provide politics. That latter option is kinda what I did.

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 really don’t see that many political posts in my subscribed feed and don’t see all that much on my Lemmy.world all feed either.

Most of my blocks have been just furry porn and the worst tankies on .ml

Lemmy.world is defederated from hexbear, Lemmygrad, and beehaw so maybe try blocking those instances if it’s too much for you

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I have been recently struggling to not go back to reddit after 3 years on Lemmy...

Almost everything I read here just makes my mood worse and the people are getting worse and worse. I really hoped it would work as a reddit alternative but it's exactly the opposite.