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?
Have you considered halting the decline of democracy? Then people won’t post depressing facts.
Or you filter by keywords. One of the two things needs to happen for you not to be exposed to negativity.
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.
Agreed. I block several communities a day.
Same. I try to always block at least 3 new sports team channels before breakfast, so that the sport ball updates don’t completely overwhelm my brief trips into all.
I love that this is a great place for local sports, but it’s not my thing.
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.
True actually. Browsing Subscribed is better than All. Although, you have to venture out into All to find new communities to subscribe to.
I also found switching between Hot and Active sorts mixes things up.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 can report them, they get removed
You should definitely report any posts that break the community’s rules
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 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
It should make less depressing content emerge
Well that’s the dream innit?
Isn’t it the whole idea? ;)
Less content ≠ less procrastination
Less content ≠ less procrastination
And?
English is not my first language (so, looking at your pseudo, by all means help me improve my grammar my dear officer) but it seemed to me the OP was looking to remove some crap from their timeline, not to procrastinate less:
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.
Yeah, but in response to OP’s post i made the comment that there’s less content for me to procrastinate with. I’m mainly referring to myself
Removed by mod
sure, but i feel we can’t escape “news” anyway, so i don’t mind having less of it in one place
Free content:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus et massa sagittis velit condimentum placerat at et dui. Sed et vehicula ex. Integer et risus ac dolor volutpat fringilla.
My wife was killed by a lorem ipsum you insensitive bastard.
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/journal.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”.
Did you subscribe to news and politics communities? I’d recommend to unsubscribe, then. The more you tailor your feed to your interests, the more you’re going to get what you’re looking for.
20 active communities which are not politics, news, memes or tech
This is why Lemmy will never become popular with the mainstream untill these people get their shit together. No sane person wants to browse a feed like mine despite the great lenghts I go attempting to block all politics and rage bait. I can only imagine how bad it is for someone just following the most popular communities and expecting a feed similar to that of Reddit.
If you don’t want to leave then I think the second best option is to keep calling out these users poisoning the platform. Just be aware that there is going to be a lot hate coming your way then. This place is filled to the brim with extremists.
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[@blue_berry
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 ;)
[user banned for having an opinion that diverges from the group]
[user banned for having an opinion that diverges from the group]
Is this something I’m supposed to react to? If so, sorry I don’t get it.
It’s just a bad joke about ‘the out of the box experience not being great’.
My bad. I should have understood. Even I, filtering out all the crap, have heard of that, well, that situation ;)
Come and join us on !casualuk@feddit.uk. We provide bottom quality banter there.
