I’ve been off and on with the Fediverse for sometime now. It’s a relatively friendly place full of fellow nerds, but with a few caveats…
My feeds seem very focused on hard information be it Gaza, tech companies doing bad things, or people pitchforking about the lastest big bad in digital privacy. This is all well and good, but it does get a bit tired after a while. Seeing the samey stuff post after post by academic types makes me more informed but also mentally draining.
Where’s the fun? On Facebook and Instagram I see light fluffy popcorn type posts of people reminiscing over Nintendo games or reels of cockatiels being cockatiels. It’s fun to scroll and interact. Here it feels like I’m in a classroom, and people, while friendly, do get quite hostile if you don’t like Linux or Star Trek.
As a leftist I like it here because it’s my bubble of people, but I’d like to see the fedi let its hair down a bit. It’s okay to talk about stuff other than infosec, privacy guides, distros, and Gaza.
Yeah, where’s the fun? There’s no posts about owls/bats/invertebrates/cats/dogs, no cooking or food posts, no pictures of people knitting socks, nobody asking general questions, no articles and pictures about space, no discussion around movies/tv/books, nobody ever posts about gaming of any kind, there’s no memes to be found anywhere, no poems or short stories, no digital/traditional/AI art.
For some reason browsing news/politics/technology always seems to revolve around depressing and infuriating topics which is different from every other platform.
Your snark is the perfect embodiment of why people leave the fedi.
I’m not the one complaining about being bored and requesting that everyone else amuse me. All those things I listed are things that are regularly posted so what’s the issue?
The issue is that you’re being shitty.
Instead of linking to any of the many communities with the content you brought up, you sarcastically threw shade at the guy for either not already knowing about it or finding it not enough while you do.
It’s elitism over one of the most fucking pitiful things you could ever be elitist about: familiarity with an online space.
He was bringing up a personal criticism of this space, not demanding it change to fit his needs.
she*
This wasn’t an innocent request for interesting topics to follow, it was taking the stance that only serious topics get discussed here and it’s boring:
I’d like to see the fedi let its hair down a bit. It’s okay to talk about stuff other than infosec, privacy guides, distros, and Gaza.
It wasn’t a demand, but certainly requesting that we “let our hair down a bit” and that they “often get bored of the Fediverse.”
This post could have been phrased as “What are some good non-political or news related communities?” And I’ll gladly accept the label of being elitist if it’s because I have minimal expectations that people explore for solutions before complaining and implying it’s everyone else that needs to change. You can’t browse all without easily bumping into the things I listed, and if you aren’t aware there’s different filtering options there’s always a sidebar link instructing you how the platform works.
Oh Christ you’re insufferable.
A few suggestions
And this list (post the link in the search to get it on your instance)
That’s why I only view subscribed communities, completely free of news/politics.
Reddit began in a similar way - being very tech focused until it started to become much more mainstream.
Block instances which have nothing you want (foreign languages, for me)
Block communities spamming gaza / war / techbro
I like to browse new across all instances, and block rather than only view subscriptions
I have the same approach of browsing all and blocking what I don’t want as I come across it. Which in my case, happens to be mostly anime and shitposting communities.
Block communities spamming gaza / war / techbro
I would agree with you if those communities were/are created to post content about gaza / war / techbro. But in most cases, those communities are generic, about news and technology, so when you block them, you also block other content that is not about gaza / war / techbro.
a lot of apps support key word blocking
Reddit began in a similar way - being very tech focused until it started to become much more mainstream.
I wasn’t at the beginning of Reddit, but I have been a user since 2013 and I always was confined in my little bubble of interests (I used it as a replacement of Feedly, so I pretty much created my curated content) it was not until the APIcalypse that it was mentioned over and over that r/all wasn’t even that good nowadays, and I was like, bruh, I should go there often, I did, and still do, but I still browse my curated content, whether is here or Reddit.
Yeah Lemmy, besides news and technology, is very quiet and I think it suffers from having communities fractured between instances, so niche interests get even less traffic than they would on Reddit. But my Mastodon feed is always busy and interesting. If it isn’t you’re not following the right people yet. I recommend some hashtag searches for things you’re interested in.
Lemmy really needs a concept of a “super-community”, some way to group different communities together and have that grouping be subscribeable. Maybe creating a post within a super-community will give the user the ability to automatically cross-post to all the individual communities, although this could be abuseable.
/kbin has got Collections, and PieFed has got topics. You may check either out.
Collections is exactly what I’d love to see added to lemmy. Especially if the collections has the ability to filter out posts cross posed to different communities.
/kbin crossposts are displayed as smaller, like on image (if you can see it :))
Edit: you can’t. Click fediverse logo to see it on /kbin
Big agree with this. One of the clients I messed with had a feature like this and it’s really nice. But we need something server-side to allow federated communities to pull from each other to create a river from separate streams as it were.
I follow lots of the the same communities across instances and that means often I’m seeing repeated posts, sometimes from different authors just to get the aggregate of things. This would be a huge boon to the usability too.
Lemmy is a little slow sometimes, but I’ve started to have the opposite problem on Mastodon. I need to weed out some hashtags or something because I can’t keep up anymore.
Even back on twitter days I never got used to it because there’s just so much content everywhere that I feel that I can’t follow any topic properly and I lose all interest. In my case the concept of microblogging is not a right fit for me.
No kidding! I was just thinking this morning that my Mastodon feed has gone bonkers lately and it is getting harder to keep up! I suppose that is a good problem to have but I only follow a few tags. I am, however, enjoying Mastodon way more than I ever did twitter.
I recommend some keyword filters. I use them to reduce certain topics from my feed, specifically about certain wars or politicians or celebrities. I did the same thing on reddit to filter out some of the “awareness” campaigns where everyone posted about the FCC chair to every single sub.
I also just browse local communities instead of the entire fediverse. This defeats the purpose of the fediverse, but it drastically reduces the number of duplicate and NSFW communities. I then mute the communities I don’t want to see. I’ll also mute the hyper specific communities that usually have complete overlap with the more general community, i.e. dogs and dogpictures.
It takes some work to get your feed to your liking, but it’s worth it in the end. There’s still far less content available than on reddit, but the amount of quality content feels similar.
You’re our hero!
How do you stay in a community, but filter content you don’t want through keywords?
Honestly I don’t even bother subscribing to comminuted. Communities for me are opt-out via muting rather than opt-in via subscriptions. I still see posts from the news community even though I have several Gaza keywords filtered out.
The insights shared in this post challenge the status quo. I appreciate the courage it takes to question norms and offer alternative perspectives. Well done. Full Version Daemon Tools Pro
jUsT mAkE coNtEnT
go out and plant a shrub
Youtube Shorts give me Brainrot but I can’t stop watching them. I don’t know what they did to the algorithm, but it perfectly captures my attention.
They’re the absolute best along with Insta reels.
After i scroll my subscribed communities, if i have extra time i scroll all. I often find something new to follow - art, cats, or that new music lyrics/AI art one that i still can’t figure out.
Not a perfect solution by any means, but you can block communities you have no interest in.
I see this as a positive. Instead of being fed content to keep me engaged by an algorithm until I suddenly realize the day is almost over and I didn’t really enjoy myself, I reach a point where I feel like I’m done for the day then I make plans, play a game, read, etc.
Now I read the news, fuck around on lemmy a bit, then actually get on with a “real” day.
Yeah I don’t really relate to the complaint because why does all your fun have to come from a single website? Does your online content have to be a one-stop shop? I just hop around Lemmy, Tildes, read sports news, maybe watch some cool videos on Youtube, etc etc. And when I’m bored with internet, I have other stuff IRL to do. Yeah I’m just not treating Lemmy like an endless scroll feed like Reddit or Instagram. I just check out what’s new (I might pop in a few times a day), participate if I want, and move on.
People on here and on mastodon are really pessimistic overall I’ve found. I still need to go to Twitter despite all the bots and engagement farming going on these days if I want to learn about new product releases or the newest possibilities of the newest technology that was released just yesterday.
I feel like the only news that get shared here and that actually get engagement are the bad ones about the war in Ukraine or in Palestine, or about anti-minority laws but we never see the good news like the fact that France added abortion as a constitutional right.
A big factor is Lemmy was setup by tankies for tankies. So the constant spam of negative news about _______ western nation is on brand.
Give it time. The porn on lemmy is growing exponentially, so the more varied content will start trickling in. My guess is roughly 3 more months before the memes really start to pick up
For the moment, a lot of the fun on some of the federated platforms is behind several steps of effort that many of the corporate platforms have streamlined people out of being accustomed to taking, which is part of why they’ve kept their larger audiences. If a single click/tap is too much, that’s enough to keep some people away from here.
It’s not a matter of laziness either, it’s more of, how much effort do I want to put into something that I’m using for casual entertainment? For many people it’s minimal, but many federated platforms currently don’t really work like that. They’ve arguably thrown the baby out with the bathwater in an overcorrection away from commercial algorithmic feeds since existing platforms have conditioned people to not have to put effort into finding silly/fun content.
The types of people to post won’t be as inclined to post if they find their posts aren’t reaching people because people mostly have to actively seek them out to engage with them at all. The types of people to more passively engage won’t be able to as easily as those posts they might engage with may never reach them because they mostly have to actively seek them out. The end result of a lack of feedback and content for both types of people, despite there being a possibility and existence of both for them, results in this recurring sense of dissatisfaction.
Note that this is written largely with Mastodon in mind, and to a lesser degree Lemmy. In Lemmy/Kbin/Mbin/PieFed/Sublinks’s cases I think they’re potentially better off in terms of structure and offering different ways to sort one’s feeds, but it’s a matter of more people joining to round out communities and discussion more.
Incredibly well thought out reply. Thank you!
