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?
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”.
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
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
It should make less depressing content emerge
Well that’s the dream innit?
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.
Removed by mod
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.
Add a filter for anything political that comes to mind, subscribe to fun instances (history memes, anime, shitposting)
Block Lemmy.ml, hexbear, and dbzer0, then make your own list of keywords to block (Trump, Elon, murder, angry, etc etc)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lol than your country has been collapsing for the last 2+ years, cus it’s always dominated by politics on lemmy.
It’s a difficult balance to strike, since enforcing content also feels like going against the foss ethos… It’s tricky. But just keep promoting Lemmy and the fediverse and some day we will have a more balanced experience
I agree. And yes, the last 2+ years have been a political shit show, because we were scared shitless of what has now happened.
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.
I’m in the same place. Avoiding politics is not only for my mental health.
In my case, for personal as well as professional reasons, I particularly need to avoid communities where advocating for political violence is tolerated (and in some even condoned.)
I blocked all the politics-specific or adjacent communities, but most of Lemmy seems to want everything to be about politics.
That’s way too toxic for me so I have to detach from Lemmy. I deleted my main account and I’m going to come back in a few months to see if it has calmed down.
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.
Block news subs.
Mind you, news subs are depressing right now for a reason.
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 ;)
[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 ;)
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
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?
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.
