With Reddit just announcing ai mods for sub reddits I think it’s finally time I fully give it up. I’ve been slowly trying to transition back into the fediverse but damn is it hard sometimes. Listen I have left leaning politics but does every other post have to be about some political shit on the all tab, 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. 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. And YES 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” and people can move about their day. 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
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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.
Block users that seem extreme and it will clear up. Its like 10 people responsible for 95% of the posts.
yep.
and like 2-3 instances responsible for those 10 people. they have multiple accounts on various instances.
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 don’t like how people talk about The Algorithm™ as though any feed algorithm is inherently a problem and exists to keep people trapped in the app.
I’d love to have an algorithm automatically curated my feed so I don’t have to manually curate it, since the curation tools are so coarse.
PieFed categories of communities do this, with user-customizable and shareable Feeds. Perhaps check out PieFed.ca - it has the same set of admins that you have now, and even without an account you can view these and then subscribe to those communities in your Lemmy one, see full list at https://piefed.ca/topics.
I mean curation by community is too coarse. Often communities have a mixture of posts I’m interested in and posts that I’m not.
The idea of communities makes sense from a moderation perspective, but I don’t like it from a feed/search perspective.
What would be more ideal? The tighter focus that e.g. subreddits provided? More niche communities here keep dying off, so that we cannot have e.g. a community based on a single game, so much as a community like just “gaming”.
PieFed has a bunch of features that may help - post flairs (e.g. see posts about the Threadiverse but not Mastodon-style Fediverse posts), user flairs (e.g. see posts by senior “enthusiasts” in a community while excluding all those “hey all I am new and I love the Threadiverse so far”), or do direct keyword filtering. There are also user icons that you can place next to people’s account names to help you visually spot posts from people that you might want to either specifically read or perhaps avoid, but whom you did not want to simply block. You can also “follow” users too, receiving notifications whenever they post.
Also, since you can always find content in those categories of communities / Topic Feeds, you can fine-tune your actual subscriptions more so that you make it tighter in the general sense. i.e. I’m saying that you can both have your cake and eat it too! e.g. I unsubscribed from the most popular politics communities, which keeps it out of my Subscribed feed and allows other posts - even low-interaction stuff (with <10 upvotes) like poetry - to come through, but then whenever I want more I can always view those posts from a politics Feed, so nothing is “lost” that way.
PieFed offers a significantly more robust set of tools than Lemmy. Though in general the entire Threadiverse is niche, and cannot replace what Reddit had - like better post organization (across communities) is great and all, but when the actual content creators choose to submit to Reddit but not here, then there is only so much that can be done about that.
The Threadiverse isn’t like “dying” or anything, but it’s definitely not thriving either, when we used to have 65k active users while now we have 35k - people are leaving us in droves and not coming back.
Automatic personalized feed curation, imo, would make it better, based on tags added by the author, by the reader, and by automatic classification, which is then weighted against your previous interaction with posts with those tags and explicit user preferences regarding those tags.
In other words, an option for an automatic personalized feed algorithm. But people here (and the devs) are against it because it’s a boogeyman.That said piefed at least lets multiple tags be added to a post where Lemmy doesn’t, so that’s the minimum bar for something like what I’m describing.
But it’s a chicken and egg problem because the tags aren’t helpful for manual or automatic curation until more people actually use them accurately. So tldr I don’t have a solution.
It sounds like you might enjoy TikTok. Those Algorithms exist for a reason - they give people what they want. Sometimes they can be overzealous, like you watch just ONE video in YouTube and it starts showing you more like it… but overall people use those platforms because they enjoy what they offer to them.
And as you say, PieFed takes giant leaps towards offering a user power to find what they want, e.g. in providing hashtags, which of course so few people use since even if they submit a post to a community on PieFed that would support them, if you do that from a Lemmy account, or via a 3rd-party app that does not provide (easy) support for hashtags, then the post will have none.
The entire Threadiverse is an experiment. To see what people will build, and to see what the community overall will use. It’s sad to see it struggling so much but… writing code it turns out is so much easier than engendering consensus among people.
In the meantime, I now suggest to people that they not rely upon the Threadiverse and especially Lemmy as their sole source of social media. The tools are still being built, and even then something like 99% of what is already available is simply not being used, and the primary thing is Content - or you might argue rather interactions with people - both of which are fairly lacking here. e.g. so many major events happening irl that I don’t even hear about the tiniest bit about here, and many times I have even searched the Threadiverse for keywords after I’ve learned about the topic elsewhere in case it was here but I simply missed it, only to find that as far as the Threadiverse is concerned the topic simply does not exist. Our low number of content creators is simply insufficient to fully replace Reddit or other sources, unless one’s goal is simply masturbatory dopamine hits from exclusively looking at memes, or arguing about which facts exist or not (were there any fatalities in the Tiannamen Square Massacre or not?).
I do enjoy tiktok, although the longer it exists (and the longer it’s under American control) the more I feel the negative effects of “the algorithm” in that it’s not just building an echo chamber by accident but it’s intentionally showing me or not showing me things for their own gain.
I want an algorithm, but I don’t want an Algorithm ™
I hope piefed takes off because I like it. But still maybe it’s for the best that I use it as an excuse to disconnect completely from social media
What juicy dopamine posts are you talking about?
there are a handful of users who just post shitty low quality rage bait from shitty websites constantly across various communities all day long. many of these users were not on fedi a year ago.
like, websites you have never heard of, that are highly editorialized and frame things as dramatic and hyperbolic as possible.
and these posts dominate many of the news and politics communities, because juicy dopamine headlines mean people upvote.
and the comment sections are dumpster fires of similar minded folks, and anyone who is skeptical/critical gets dog piled and/or the OP comes out swinging calling them a fascist for daring to challenge the ‘trump does thing world is collapsing’ narrative they are all addicted to.
it’s all engagement/rage bait quality stuff. it’s not like, respectable moderate journalism that reports facts, that shit doesn’t get upvotes because the headlines are not juicy enough.
FWIW I have been on fedi for 3 years and this stuff is exploded the past 6-9 months, I used to like the news/politics subs a year ago because they were not dominated by this low quality content and typically had more respectable news-sources. but you can’t compete with low-brow rage bait trolls who are just here to collect as many upvotes and flood the zone with dramatic bullshit to drive engagement, and that’s what these posters are doing. if you confront them they just say you are a bad person who clearly supports Trump etc.
Somehow on the backend the wires must have got crossed and sent c/Lemmyshitpost content over to c/news instead 🤪
(/s …?)
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.
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.
You can shape the All feed to your liking by blocking communities that regularly post stuff you don’t like. I did this with meme communities and rarely see any memes anymore. Sometimes it’s a whole instance that is full of communities you don’t want to see, then you might want to block it. Examples of those for me are ani.social for sexualized anime and fedinsfw.app for NSFW content.
Once you do this kind of trimming, the All feed becomes a lot less annoying.
I’m just blocking all political/news communities on sight. It’s helped a lot.
The participants do tend to escape, I suddenly found myself in a meme community full of North Korea apologists the other day. Anyone complaining about it was immediately removed.
Rules mean nothing unless they are actively enforced.
This is the (only) way, but it’s also like infinite whack-a-mole except slightly more irritating.
Especially when they label themselves like “memes” and “comics” etc.
Real. I have laughed harder at a funeral than 99% of all “political humor”. Did you know Trump is orange HAHEHEHAEHAEUAEAUEAUHEAUHEUUHEUHEEUHEUHEHUEHE.
Fwiw there is !nonpolitical_comics@piefed.social, though with at best one post per week (or almost per month lately), and on the instance that has decided to shadow-censor votes even from other users of the Threadiverse like Lemmy and Mbin without disclosure of that fact. Announcement of the latter might have had a really chilling effect upon the community since this past month the number of posts has really dropped off a cliff.
It’s been really hard for people to be the change they want to see in the world, and to share the same spaces despite such major differences in outlook on life. And for all the criticism of their moderation policies (note I am not questioning the validity of that, especially since I don’t post or typically even comment in the political communities so have no direct experience there), each time a MAJOR Threadiverse user leaves, they take all of their posting efforts with them - I’m talking about the likes of FlyingSquid, PugJesus, and I almost hesitate to mention AdmiralPatrick since I’ve already been accused of being an alt of his:-).
I tend to not post often myself unless I really have something I want to share, as people either can respond negatively or else not at all, even for like a nonpolitical comic, and that can make it somewhat un-fun. (So instead I try to make the Threadiverse more lively by contributing comments:-)
Yeah, the only way to enjoy lemmy is heavily, heavily curated. My community blocklist has over 300 entries these days …
To me that signals someone deeply in their bubble.
But sure, you have that option… Block me too, this comment is probably also too spicy. :)
I mean at least it is a curated bubble which is 100x better than one created by an algorithm.
there is no total and im to lazy to count but mine is quite a scroll to. Im in my bubble of no memes or sports or niche communities im not interested in.
some of us enjoy being a bubble of civil and sane folks, rather than extreme nutbags who fantasize about mass murder.
The somewhat recent Lindsey Graham death news was useful. The dude was an absolute scumbag, but everyone cheering his death and calling for the deaths of other politicians went right into the blocklist. I did some reading about it, and took the pulse of some younger people I know and it does seem that many (most?) Gen Z’s and younger Millennials generally feel that violence is the only solution to their perceived problems, with some even going as far as supporting retaliatory genocide in Israel. And that feeling of bloodthirsty revenge seemed prevalent. The notion of “two wrongs don’t make a right” is apparently old fashioned. Made me realize that my Xennial views are not very well aligned with the younger generations. Also makes me sad for the future, as I was hoping the foreign interventions and wars would eventually end and peace would prevail. Guess not.
What terrifies me, is yeah i see that in person all the time. Not just on the internet.
It’s revenge, and bitterness. I meet 30 year olds making like 200K a year who are steeped in bitterness they can’t afford a beach front mansion. A large part of it is pure entitlement and arrogance. Many young people think the world just owes them and they know better than everyone else and are completely delusional about how the world works. And often just spout meaningless cliche bullshit they know from social media rather than having any knowledge of history or any perspective with context.
And they encourage it in each other. I’ve seen so many awful groups at bars just dogging each other on the say the most heinous shit and openly declaring how they actively abuse and want to abuse and hurt other people. Then they basically think they are good people because they make posts on social media about how they support Trans people, and that justifies their thirst for blood or something. It’s insane. It’s like a collective psychosis.
And of course the irony is if you confronted them with the same violence that spouts out of their mouths, they will cry foul and play the victim. Because it’s OK for them to want to murder people, but they also see a cafe that doesn’t have oat milk as ‘abusing’ them.
Eternal September… except it’s fucking Groundhog Day now!!
There’s lots of content on the Threadiverse that I find pointless or dumb, but that’s why I only subscribe to communities that interest me… If I feel like punishing myself, I go to /all 😂😁😘
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.
There’s a couple ways to use Lemmy and make it nicer to use, one is curating a well fleshed out subscribed list, the other is using all but blocking every community that doesn’t interest you or has topics you actively dislike, making it just as pleasant as your subscribed view.
Personally I do both. My subscribed view is just things I like and no news communities. My All feed blocks everything I don’t like, let’s me discover new communities, and gives me a dose of news when I want it.
I blocked all the manga shit. And life is now good.
Agreed. Too much politics. I started my own communities for things I’m interested in and I recommend you try that.
You can just curate your experience by making changes to the feed and shutting off what you feel are sources of distressing content.
Given the current state of affairs where if being a progressive American is a harrowing struggle, it’s not surprising the fediverse is a refuge and outlet for angry progressives and people who have been alienated by spez’s war on left-leaning content, as he will ban anyone even remotely or casually talking of committing violence on awful fascists and robber barons.
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
Agreed. Wish there would be a political filter similar to the nsfw one. In that way you wouldn’t have to isolate yourself to certain subs
