- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
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*raises hand*
Uh, this is a Lemmy’s sir
Idk man, the universe is an algorithm.
Everything I did, am doing, and will do, are all part of the algorithm. I have no control. Free will is a lie. Even the act of me typing this comment, is not of my free will. The neurons are making me do it. AH FUCK STOOOOP IT YE FUCKING NEURONS, BAD NEURONS…
Everything is fine, I have free will, disregard everything above, that’s the other half of the brain in this body that’s being weird.
THERE IS NO FREE WILL
AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH
You did not choose Lemmy. Lemmy chose you! Accept your fate. Accept Determinism.
Good use of this image lol. But wait till you see the time knife.
Reddit is clearly the Bad Place.
Life is the bad place.
Yes! Full agree
Continues scrolling lemmy
Lemmy is not controlled by some sort of curated algorithm. You have full control over the sorting and what goes on your screen in a way that mainstream social media services do not allow.
If you think there’s something addictive or otherwise wrong about your feed, fix it. “The power is yours!”
Agreed, I was mostly joking, but there are still algorithms that drive the hot and controversial sorting. The fact that you can look up how those algorithms work is also a major difference.
And usually by “algorithm” people mean a feed that is curated to you specifically based off all the data they’ve vacuumed up. Hot/controversial have a clear set of rules about upvote/downvotes over time and they apply exactly the same to everyone, so everyone sorting by hot for instance on a thread or community is seeing the exact same thing
Open source, tunable locally running content discovery and search with crowd sourced share preference models (like, people who like x probably like y)
I only browse by subscribed and I have half of Lemmy banned ngl I hate algorithmic feeds and corpo social media in general I don’t use it, I don’t see any ads online ever, and I’m often shocked by their quantity outside, I don’t know how others just do only algorithms like it’s nothing.
Lemmy users reading this:
LOL
I was actually thinking about my experience with Lemmy as I was reading this article, particularly how the scrolling is made to generate rage. I don’t filter my feed and just view “all”, but I don’t think I’ve once walked away from Lemmy not in a bad mood.
Now that may be observation bias or something, or a function of how I don’t tailor my own experience, but regardless, Lemmy leaves me angrier when I leave then when I open the app. I’m trying to cut back and eventually quit.
Viewing all? Yeah there’s your problem. Subscribe to things you want to see, and never even think about the rest.
and how do you discover new things?
Once in a while I skim the communities list. Other users make recommendations too.
It’s how I’ve kept my sanity for years using social media. Sticking to subscribed feed which is hobby/entertainment related stuff, and using aggressive filtering options if I decided to venture into all.
Same when it comes to youtube using newpipe and freetube so I stick to my feed and hiding stuff like trending videos, recommended videos, popular videos, and comments.
Turning a platform into being as minimalistic as possible has been my favorite method of consumption.
@catloaf @thebeardedpotato I go one further and subscribe to feeds in mastodon (feel a bit like an impostor though 👀
Setting up my own instance ended up being pretty good for me since it meant I had to manually subscribe to every community I want. The quality of “All” posts depends heavily on the instance you’re on.
You could also use the Subscribed feed
If you’re on an instance with only 1 user, they’re the same thing. But yes, Lemmy’s a lot better if you just subscribe to what you want.
A bit of a random question: on a single user instance, if you subscribe to a community, then later unsubscribe from it, would that community still show up in your All feed?
I think it would show up in All still, but only posts that were synced while it was subscribed I think?. I haven’t really checked if posts would disappear again. On the “Top Day” view I use, the “All” posts are identical to “Subscribed”
What? No, use “All” to browse through federated instances and then subscribe to any interesting communities across the whole Fediverse. Then stick to the “subscribed” feed and only occasionally recheck “All” if you’re bored and looking for new communities with none in particular; otherwise, run searches for them.
Let me explain how it works when you self host like me:
- “All” starts out completely empty, there are no federated instances to find this way.
- You then have to browse communities on other instances and subscribe to them on your own instance. Only then will posts start showing up in “All”.
- Since there’s only 1 user, the list of communities in “All” is the exact same list of communities in “Subscribed”
For most people yes, you can just browse “All” unless you’re on a smaller instance, since someone on your Instance has probably already subscribed to the community you’re looking for.
Just ban political communities
You can also set filters in some clients. And other micro feed like software (piefed) can put filters for your user.
Or browse by new. Seems to work for me.
The scrolling is only made to generate rage if you browse all (your issue) or curate a feed with rage bait 🤷♂️ you can fix it in seconds if you want.
No algorithm makes social networks so annoying. Lemmy is so much annoying because of this. I always see the same stuff, aka US news and some shitposts, the usual upvoted and trending stuff
There’s no discovery algorithm and no way to see posts from smaller subscribed communities easily. Each sorting method returns non-interesting posts.
Through the Voyager phone app I sometimes use the ‘random community’ search option to make Lemmy like StumbleUpon. I dont see this random option through desktop though…maybe its a Voyager thing
People say algorithms hook you and make you dependent: they show you the stuff you want, so you stay for longer. If I didn’t want to see stuff I want, I wouldn’t go to Lemmy…
They really do. Most of these algorithms have been developed by the same people that work at casinos algorithms. Lemmy is a forum like, social media.
I’m sure they do, but I want them. It doesn’t have to be dumb content. It can make you discover and learn things while being addicting.
We need open source, local running, use tunable, auditable, collectively shareable content discovery algorithm
All for it, except maybe for it to run locally. An instance running it will be faster as it already has all posts and comments stored.
I want it all in a physical object in my home, that I can throw in the furnace any time. I don’t mind the extra milliseconds, I want it in my computer not someone else’s computer aka the cloud
Sort by new is your answer here.
Shows uninteresting posts / trash posts containing a few words or so
And also mainly shows posts from bigger communities. Smaller communities tend to have much less posts per day/per month, so seeing one is really rare
Saw it in my feed btw
Or you can aggressively tailor them. I still use FB because I enjoy several industry and hobby groups there. With a few FF plugins and proactively closing any ads, FB is completely usable and enjoyable.
Any social media you can’t control like this is definitely problematic, but I haven’t explored too many other platforms to see if they can be tailored. I did abandon Threads because it’s a right wing toxic troll hellhole with a shitty design, so some can’t be “fixed”.
But I don’t want to think.
I ready mbin by all > active (I take the approach of banning magazines I am not interested in rather than being in a subscribed bubble) and the few Japan-related (tax/legal/resident) subredits that haven’t moved here yet by newest (only subscribed communities there of which I have like 5). I watch videos from my subscribed list until there’s nothing left (rare) so rarely use any kind of algo feed. I watch twitch only for people I follow. I don’t use any other social media for now (I did just start a business, so that will change somewhat since I need to advertise and get engagement).
Technology Connections put out a video recently about this, it’s quite entertaining: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJpZjg8GuA
OMG, I was just going to say the same thing!
Nice to see another fan in the wild! :D
I’m currently trying to figure out how to use RSS for this reason.
I brows Lemmy by all and then I filter out the communities I don’t want to see. This lets me see the new communities that pop up and decided if I want to sub to them. I have around 300 blocked.
Yeah sometimes there is some overzealous people making some quite strange communities by the handfull at one go though, but yeah, blocking everything you don’t like is the way to go IMO too.
Lemmy doesn’t have a recommendation algorithm, yet our feeds are just as bad - if not worse. If your daily interest revolves around reading about U.S. politics, this might not be obvious to you, but for the rest of us, it’s painfully clear. And before you suggest “just avoid political communities” or “stick to your subscription feed,” let me assure you that doesn’t work. It’s not just political communities - it’s everywhere. I can’t even read articles about space without people injecting their opinions on the CEO of a certain rocket company. Even communities like microblogmemes are beyond salvation. If you limit yourself exclusively to communities where the “no politics” rule is actually enforced, you’ll exhaust new content within about two minutes each day.
My point is that the algorithm itself isn’t the sole issue. Algorithms can actually be helpful, provided you invest even minimal effort into training them. YouTube doesn’t bombard me with politics because it knows I’m not interested. Lemmy’s user base, however, seems so addicted to outrage that outrage inevitably dominates everyone’s experience here. If we measure the quality of social media by counting the “regrettable minutes” we’ve spent there, Lemmy would rank at the absolute bottom. Even Twitter doesn’t irritate me as consistently as Lemmy does. I’ve gone to great lengths setting up content filters to block politics, but even when half my feed is blocked, the majority of what’s left is still U.S. politics.
If you limit yourself exclusively to communities where the “no politics” rule is actually enforced, you’ll exhaust new content within about two minutes each day.
It’s almost like US politics are a historic fucking shit show and that affects many other things.
Doesn’t mean I want to spend all day everyday reading about it. I have other interests.
Maybe stop sticking your head in the sand? 🤷
Exactly. Maybe if you’re seeing it everywhere that’s because the issue is so pervasive it affects that much of the lives of those using it. So either do something about it or go to spaces where people don’t have problems I guess.
Not everyone wants to spend their entire day reading about the politics of a country they don’t even live in. Have you considered that some people prefer getting their news once a day from a proper news outlet, and then spending the rest of their day focused on topics they’re actually interested in? That’s not “sticking your head in the sand,” it’s having healthy boundaries.
To be privilege enough to take on that firehose…
Not wanting to be bombarded by a foreign country’s political antics and sociopathic leaders == sticking your head in the sand? Interesting take!
we’re all connected
I have blocked any mention of trump and musk, and yet I still know every single stupid thing they do. It’s impossible to avoid it.
It’s almost like…one is the leader of the richest country in the world and the other is running a government office that’s dismantling the government.
Seriously, if you guys were alive in the 1930s or 1940s you’d be there like “I just can’t pick up the paper anymore without talk of this Hitler guy!”.
People keep saying that and although he’s abhorrent and probably a threat to democracy in the US I don’t think he’s going to start a war. He lacks a convenient victim that he can use to justify a war, and honestly I don’t think he’s smart enough to come up with one.
Anyway a war wouldn’t achieve anything for him other than getting a target on his back.
That’s the thing - consuming anything even remotely resembling a healthy news diet requires actively avoiding most of it. Unfiltered news consumption means getting firehosed with information to the point of paralysis and depression. I wouldn’t be surprised if even a hermit living in the woods knows the latest about Trump and Musk. There’s no way to avoid hearing about them and who ever suggests you can clearly haven’t even tried.
At least part of the problem for me is that the app I am using to access Lemmy isn’t really very good. I can block based on keywords in the title but not keywords in the post.
If I really wanted to I could probably find an app with better blocking abilities and try then to see if it’s possible to completely block out the US politics, but I’m not massively incentivized to do so. Not being American I don’t really get massively riled up about it, I get more upset about my own country’s politicians, which most Americans probably have never even heard of.
The greater problem is simply the fact that US content in general seems to get over emphasized in lieu of everything else. There’s a whole world of stuff going on out there and all we ever hear about is America. Even when the US has moderately sane leaders that is the case.
I really shouldn’t know who the congressman for Texas is, there’s no reason I should know that, yet I do. California catches fire, world news, massive flooding in Australia, barely mentioned.
I use Voyager and I’ve blocked a ton of communities, and keywords related to it. I like the blocking functions on there so far. I need to also subscribe to more communities so I can have a better Home feed.
Lemmy is better if you avoid all at least. On local I usually get stuff about Europe a lot more. But subscribed is dwarfed by technology a it’s the largest community. Subscribed + scaled list seems to be a fairly good list though.
Might be time to start blocking some too, for my own sanity.
Lemmy’s user base, however, seems so addicted to outrage that outrage inevitably dominates everyone’s experience here.
Ye-es, people look for outrage. Especially people who left mainstream platforms because of outrage. We don’t have gladiator fights today, so the wish for murder should be vented out differently somehow.
I’ve gone to great lengths setting up content filters to block politics, but even when half my feed is blocked, the majority of what’s left is still U.S. politics.
Right, and wouldn’t it be much more convenient to block posts and users and whole communities by regex and logical rules?
Say, post title contains anything “federal” and “government” like - kill. Post content contains something about voting - kill. More than one third of comments involves political jargon - kill. The resulting kill score is measured against threshold.
But of course that would make communities and instances and moderators as they exist now much less useful. That would transition us back to Usenet in some sense. People don’t want to give up that kind of power, even unconsciously they’ll resist. When they are a community mod and everything about its climate depends on them, it’s different in prestige from them just cleaning up obvious abuse, and the climate depending on individual kill rules set up on clients.
I want a local LLM filtering my feed(s). So I really don’t need to see Elmo and Donald -related stuff.
Simple word filters don’t work, but with a LLM I might be able to make it work
Agree. Blocking / keyword based filtering is quite blunt tool. I’d much rather tell AI what I don’t want to see and have it analyze the content for me.
This is basically the same thing as what the big platforms do. You’re just offloading the decisions of what to see to a neural network and hope it’s deciding correctly. I’m not sure what a solution would be but I’m not sure I would put my eggs in the llm/ai basket. Not without a lot more details from the models on why they made a decision.
I was just thinking about this yesterday. These days, Lemmy is just making me depressed. I like to read comments to get further insight to articles, maybe someone trying to point out the author’s bias, or a joke. But Lemmy comments are all some variation of “the world is doomed”, “kill this person”, or “capitalism is the root of all woe”. They are neither useful, insightful, or improve my day in any way. Lemmy is making my life less enjoyable. It was already an overall negative and cynical space during the Biden administration; now it is unbearable.
I’ve been on Lemmy for a long time now, since Reddit killed 3rd party clients with their API change, but now I think I might go back to Reddit. The company itself has a lot of problems, but at least I can get a lot of non-doom content to fill my day.
To be fair, I don’t think Lemmy is to blame for all the negativity. It’s impossible to escape politics nowadays thanks to American dominance in social media. And since the US is a dumpster fire since 2016, the rest of the world gets to be a dumpster fire as well.
In my opinion, Lemmy is the least negative social media platform out there and that’s saying something. I advise against going back to Reddit. I take peeks at it every once in a while and oh boy did things go downhill since I deleted my Reddit account after the API changes.
The best way to deal with all of this is to limit your exposure to social media all together.
This isn’t my experience at all, maybe I just have curated my subscriptions enough that I don’t see that much. Or maybe it’s just because I’m so used to just tuning out socialist/communist comments on threads that have nothing to do with politics.
It’s also worth noting that Lenny’s algorithms sort by either top (which is just votes), hot (which is based on votes and comments which will surface contentious topics like politics more often), new (which is just when it was posted), and scaled (which is just hot but proportional to the size of the community so it will surface smaller communities more often).
If you sort by hot it’s going to give you a similar feed to Reddit. I prefer to sort by top by 6/12/24hr and by scaled personally.
