Aside from suggested communities, make sure to filter out content by keywords.
You can do that on many mobile apps, while in the web version it is commonly done through uBlock Origin functionality.
After that, Lemmy gets quite nice
this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2025
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Ask Lemmy
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I use Sync and it lets me block keywords like Trump,Elon,Musk. It doesn't catch everything but does a good amount.
I'm trying to move my news off social media and on to RSS. I set up an RSS reader with a handful of trusted and varied news sources (some mainstream, some independent, some local, some foreign) and now I'm starting to filter out news from Lemmy and other social networks.
Some things I quickly noticed is that not having a comments section is actually great, I can jump straight to or past subjects I'm not in the mood for, and there's no endless scroll but if I feel there's too little I can add more sources and if there's too much I can take some out. I still also use Lemmy so if I find an interesting new blog or website, I can add it to my RSS reader to keep following it instead of relying on strangers posting new content and it getting voted up. This lets me focus more on the smaller special interest groups that social media is actually good for.
The issue is that mods here seem to not care if their communities turn into doomer shitposts. It's quite baffling.
Every single community, no matter how unrelated they are to politics, are now just spammed with political bullshit. I'm actually on the cusp on uninstalling my Lemmy app.
Does anyone else feel this way about their Lemmy experience?
Yes. I usually stick to fandom communities where I post some cool fanart and chat about latest books I have read. I avoid all feed at all cost.
I hoped that !hopeposting@lemmy.world would be the same as r/hopeposting@reddit.com but the comments are night and day in there. I still repost stuff but a drive to make OC memes is just not there.
I usually hang out in !anime@ani.social, !lightnovels@ani.social and !hermitcraft@lemmy.world
P.S. Also my polish instance szmer.info doesn't have as bad ALL feed as the lemmy.world due to people that don't care about US politics and not subscribing to those communities.
Step 1: don't browse the All feed. I dunno how Reddit was okay for you, visiting r/all was always full of Trump this Trump that every 5 minutes.
At least Reddit had a nice feature where you could filter out up to 100 communities from r/all. I could still get a varied experience while not having to look at things like politics, sportsball, or games I didn't care for.
Block news subs.
Mind you, news subs are depressing right now for a reason.
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.
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.
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
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.itjust.works
Edit:fixed link
Add a filter for anything political that comes to mind, subscribe to fun instances (history memes, anime, shitposting)
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.
You are 100% correct, negative news has a greater impact on people than positive: https://assets.csom.umn.edu/assets/71516.pdf
Media sites know this, and use it to drive engagement:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01538-4 https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/social-media-facebook-twitter-politics-b1870628.html
And so, negative headlines are getting worse: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0276367
But negative news is addictive and psychologically damaging: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/why-we-worry/202009/the-psychological-impact-negative-news
So it's important to try and stay positive:
https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/benefits-of-good-news
If you want a break from the constant negativity, here are some sites that report specifically on positive news:
- https://www.goodgoodgood.co/
- https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/
- https://fixthenews.com/
- https://positivenewsfoundation.org/
- https://www.onlygoodnewsdaily.com/
And here's 35 more: https://news.feedspot.com/good_news_websites/
Some communities on Lemmy you might be interested in:
- !goodnews@kbin.social
- !lemmybewholesome@lemmy.world
- !goodnewseveryone@sh.itjust.works
- !upliftingnews@lemmy.world
- https://lemmy.world/c/hopeposting
- https://lemmy.world/c/worldinprogress
- https://lemmy.world/c/climatehope
Remember, realistic optimism is important and, unlike what some might have you believe, is not the same as blissful ignorance or 'burying your head in the sand': https://www.learning-mind.com/realistic-optimism-blind-positivity/
https://www.centreforoptimism.com/realisticoptimism
And doesn't mean you must stay uninformed on current affairs: https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/how-to-stop-doom-scrolling
https://goodable.co/blog/tips-for-balancing-positive-and-negative-news/
kbin.social is dead btw... if you post there it won't federate and only people on your instance will see your post.
Noted, thanks
Why don’t you just keep away from c/all and stick to your subscribed communities?
To discover new communities, I suggest subscribing to c/newcommunities
That's my approach - once in a while I take a peek at /all, get stressed out and quickly retreat to my curated home again.
besides !newcommunities@lemmy.world there's also !communitypromo@lemmy.ca and !trendingcommunities@feddit.nl
plus you can always just look through the "communities" listing -- in the web interface it's at the top of the page, just select "communities" and "all".
Yeah lemmy has bit too much political content. Americans seem very obsessed with it. I just kept blocking all of them and now my feed is pretty free of political nonsense. If I want that kind of content i'll just read the news paper or go to my news feed of choice
To be fair, a large slice of the user base is in the US and currently everything is collapsing around us. It should come as no surprise that we complain about it a lot. The mods of various communities could certainly enforce rules more; e.g. in shitposting or memes, remove any political content. It would help the situation.
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Unfortunately there's almost nothing left once you've blocked all that. I'm close to leaving. No one will miss me, whatever. Occasionally I have a nice interaction though.
Won't argue with that, 70% is Linux and Politics combined. I do enjoy the "small scale forum" feel, but indeed after scrolling for 30 minutes you will probaly have consumed most of the content for the coming 48hours. After that, shamefully admitting, it's back to reddit and tiktok.
I’ve been using as an impetus to pick up a book instead, or do something constructive. I get my shot of dopamine, but since it has an end I am forced to do other things.
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i blocked every single news and politics communities, as well as all the "*** infuriating" ones, it has drastically improved the content of my timeline :)
It will also significantly reduce the amount of content being displayed on my feed
sure, but i feel we can't escape "news" anyway, so i don't mind having less of it in one place
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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.
You have to block A LOT of communities. In fact, blocking communities is more important than subscribing to them!
Also: https://lemmy.today/post/22524765
Also: Voyager (or other apps) with filters for keywords.
In fact, blocking communities is more important than subscribing to them!
I browse Subscribed. Whitelisting communities is almost certainly going to be a lot more aggressive than browsing All and blacklisting communities.
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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
Voyager also has a web app interface that has keyword filtering which works well for me. https://vger.app/
I just block a lot of communities like that. It’s easy in the Voyager app to do this on Lemmy. I also have some filters set up for some of the common words that are used in the doom and gloom posts like what you’re talking about.
It helps out a lot to decrease a lot of the overly negative stuff.
If you find yourself wanting some of it back, maybe you could create a second account that you could log into as you feel it is needed? Voyager allows me to switch between accounts very easily. Or it did, I haven’t had a secondary account in some time, but I did have that function last time I needed it.
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.
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Does anyone else feel this way about their Lemmy experience?
The out of the box experience is not great (neither is Reddit, if you're asking me, it's at least as depressing to see the amount of trash/low effort posts on their home page). But once I switched to 'Subscribed' only view, things were already much better since I was only seeing content I was interested in (aka no politics or drama of any sort).
As already suggested: !newcommunities@lemmy.world is good place to see what's new, also there is !communitypromo@lemmy.ca
Most importantly, Lemmy is not Reddit for many reasons but this one is more directly related to your question: it's much smaller (to give you an idea, I moderate a journaling community we recently reached... 300 members (of which less than a handful is active), whereas the Reddit journaling community is 2 Million+ ;). So, there is a lot less content posted on Lemmy. Back on Reddit, I was mostly a commenter (barely posting anything new myself) but I quickly realized that if I wanted to see stuff I was interested in on Lemmy I better start... posting myself ;)
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Pornography is never bad news. Normalize more pornography in your life
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