With Reddit just announcing ai mods for sub reddits I think it’s finally time I fully give it up. I’ve been slowly trying to transition back into the fediverse but damn is it hard sometimes. Listen I have left leaning politics but does every other post have to be about some political shit on the all tab, I feel like I’m forced into this box that is my subscribed feed or I have to actively search out new communities because all is just a political circle jerk that I don’t care about. Not to mention the moment I came back I saw a fucking flow chart on the instances drama of the week. If I wasn’t so dedicated to dropping Reddit I think the average Joe would have left by now seeing all of this. And YES I have been trying to be the change I want to see if you check my profile I regularly post in meme subs non political just funny memes to be like “lmao” and people can move about their day. I’m not saying there ISNT other type of content on lemmy or piefed it just feels like the stuff that floats to the top is political
You must log in or # to comment.
Politics is important. If anything it’s the most important thing right now. You can try to make your own bubbles but eventually it will reach you. I’m sorry but we just don’t have the privilege of ignoring reality. Hopefully we’ll go back to those times in pur lifetime.
What you’re missing is the algorithm.
You didn’t want to see that on Reddit, and it’s designed to steer away. Lemmy doesn’t decide what you see. You have to curate your own feed through a long process of blocking users and communities and using subscribe rather than a steady diet of all.
There’s also no curated algorithm to cause that dopamine rush, that causes the addiction, so you want to scroll and hit those juicy dopamine posts, but without the manipulation designed to keep you engaged and stuck, not going to happen. So it’s also a great place to detox from your brain being in the habit of seeking dopamine that way, it’s like a slow lowering to the ground, instead of cold turkey.
I was really feeling the loss of those dopamine hits, when I first transitioned over here, but now I don’t look for those hits here at all, and I can just enjoy a small scroll, without getting stuck in here, and put my phone down, which is nice.
What reddit and Facebook do, is hugely manipulative and created and curated to trap you there. I don’t know if that needs to be the same here, as much. And maybe curating your home page, really is the way to go.
I don’t like how people talk about The Algorithm™ as though any feed algorithm is inherently a problem and exists to keep people trapped in the app.
I’d love to have an algorithm automatically curated my feed so I don’t have to manually curate it, since the curation tools are so coarse.
PieFed categories of communities do this, with user-customizable and shareable Feeds. Perhaps check out PieFed.ca - it has the same set of admins that you have now, and even without an account you can view these and then subscribe to those communities in your Lemmy one, see full list at https://piefed.ca/topics.
I mean curation by community is too coarse. Often communities have a mixture of posts I’m interested in and posts that I’m not.
The idea of communities makes sense from a moderation perspective, but I don’t like it from a feed/search perspective.
What would be more ideal? The tighter focus that e.g. subreddits provided? More niche communities here keep dying off, so that we cannot have e.g. a community based on a single game, so much as a community like just “gaming”.
PieFed has a bunch of features that may help - post flairs (e.g. see posts about the Threadiverse but not Mastodon-style Fediverse posts), user flairs (e.g. see posts by senior “enthusiasts” in a community while excluding all those “hey all I am new and I love the Threadiverse so far”), or do direct keyword filtering. There are also user icons that you can place next to people’s account names to help you visually spot posts from people that you might want to either specifically read or perhaps avoid, but whom you did not want to simply block. You can also “follow” users too, receiving notifications whenever they post.
Also, since you can always find content in those categories of communities / Topic Feeds, you can fine-tune your actual subscriptions more so that you make it tighter in the general sense. i.e. I’m saying that you can both have your cake and eat it too! e.g. I unsubscribed from the most popular politics communities, which keeps it out of my Subscribed feed and allows other posts - even low-interaction stuff (with <10 upvotes) like poetry - to come through, but then whenever I want more I can always view those posts from a politics Feed, so nothing is “lost” that way.
PieFed offers a significantly more robust set of tools than Lemmy. Though in general the entire Threadiverse is niche, and cannot replace what Reddit had - like better post organization (across communities) is great and all, but when the actual content creators choose to submit to Reddit but not here, then there is only so much that can be done about that.
The Threadiverse isn’t like “dying” or anything, but it’s definitely not thriving either, when we used to have 65k active users while now we have 35k - people are leaving us in droves and not coming back.
Automatic personalized feed curation, imo, would make it better, based on tags added by the author, by the reader, and by automatic classification, which is then weighted against your previous interaction with posts with those tags and explicit user preferences regarding those tags.
In other words, an option for an automatic personalized feed algorithm. But people here (and the devs) are against it because it’s a boogeyman.That said piefed at least lets multiple tags be added to a post where Lemmy doesn’t, so that’s the minimum bar for something like what I’m describing.
But it’s a chicken and egg problem because the tags aren’t helpful for manual or automatic curation until more people actually use them accurately. So tldr I don’t have a solution.
It sounds like you might enjoy TikTok. Those Algorithms exist for a reason - they give people what they want. Sometimes they can be overzealous, like you watch just ONE video in YouTube and it starts showing you more like it… but overall people use those platforms because they enjoy what they offer to them.
And as you say, PieFed takes giant leaps towards offering a user power to find what they want, e.g. in providing hashtags, which of course so few people use since even if they submit a post to a community on PieFed that would support them, if you do that from a Lemmy account, or via a 3rd-party app that does not provide (easy) support for hashtags, then the post will have none.
The entire Threadiverse is an experiment. To see what people will build, and to see what the community overall will use. It’s sad to see it struggling so much but… writing code it turns out is so much easier than engendering consensus among people.
In the meantime, I now suggest to people that they not rely upon the Threadiverse and especially Lemmy as their sole source of social media. The tools are still being built, and even then something like 99% of what is already available is simply not being used, and the primary thing is Content - or you might argue rather interactions with people - both of which are fairly lacking here. e.g. so many major events happening irl that I don’t even hear about the tiniest bit about here, and many times I have even searched the Threadiverse for keywords after I’ve learned about the topic elsewhere in case it was here but I simply missed it, only to find that as far as the Threadiverse is concerned the topic simply does not exist. Our low number of content creators is simply insufficient to fully replace Reddit or other sources, unless one’s goal is simply masturbatory dopamine hits from exclusively looking at memes, or arguing about which facts exist or not (were there any fatalities in the Tiannamen Square Massacre or not?).
I do enjoy tiktok, although the longer it exists (and the longer it’s under American control) the more I feel the negative effects of “the algorithm” in that it’s not just building an echo chamber by accident but it’s intentionally showing me or not showing me things for their own gain.
I want an algorithm, but I don’t want an Algorithm ™
I hope piefed takes off because I like it. But still maybe it’s for the best that I use it as an excuse to disconnect completely from social media
What juicy dopamine posts are you talking about?
there are a handful of users who just post shitty low quality rage bait from shitty websites constantly across various communities all day long. many of these users were not on fedi a year ago.
like, websites you have never heard of, that are highly editorialized and frame things as dramatic and hyperbolic as possible.
and these posts dominate many of the news and politics communities, because juicy dopamine headlines mean people upvote.
and the comment sections are dumpster fires of similar minded folks, and anyone who is skeptical/critical gets dog piled and/or the OP comes out swinging calling them a fascist for daring to challenge the ‘trump does thing world is collapsing’ narrative they are all addicted to.
it’s all engagement/rage bait quality stuff. it’s not like, respectable moderate journalism that reports facts, that shit doesn’t get upvotes because the headlines are not juicy enough.
FWIW I have been on fedi for 3 years and this stuff is exploded the past 6-9 months, I used to like the news/politics subs a year ago because they were not dominated by this low quality content and typically had more respectable news-sources. but you can’t compete with low-brow rage bait trolls who are just here to collect as many upvotes and flood the zone with dramatic bullshit to drive engagement, and that’s what these posters are doing. if you confront them they just say you are a bad person who clearly supports Trump etc.
Somehow on the backend the wires must have got crossed and sent c/Lemmyshitpost content over to c/news instead 🤪
(/s …?)
You curate the content you see on your own, doesn’t have to be political if you don’t want to.
I suggest to use https://lemmyverse.net/ to find communities you like and keep the feed to subscribed, so you see them and them only.
this way, Lemmy is actually good, no algorithm, I choose what to see and that’s a beautiful thing.
You can shape the All feed to your liking by blocking communities that regularly post stuff you don’t like. I did this with meme communities and rarely see any memes anymore. Sometimes it’s a whole instance that is full of communities you don’t want to see, then you might want to block it. Examples of those for me are ani.social for sexualized anime and fedinsfw.app for NSFW content.
Once you do this kind of trimming, the All feed becomes a lot less annoying.
There’s lots of content on the Threadiverse that I find pointless or dumb, but that’s why I only subscribe to communities that interest me… If I feel like punishing myself, I go to /all 😂😁😘
Agreed. Too much politics. I started my own communities for things I’m interested in and I recommend you try that.
There’s a couple ways to use Lemmy and make it nicer to use, one is curating a well fleshed out subscribed list, the other is using all but blocking every community that doesn’t interest you or has topics you actively dislike, making it just as pleasant as your subscribed view.
Personally I do both. My subscribed view is just things I like and no news communities. My All feed blocks everything I don’t like, let’s me discover new communities, and gives me a dose of news when I want it.
I blocked all the manga shit. And life is now good.
You can just curate your experience by making changes to the feed and shutting off what you feel are sources of distressing content.
Given the current state of affairs where if being a progressive American is a harrowing struggle, it’s not surprising the fediverse is a refuge and outlet for angry progressives and people who have been alienated by spez’s war on left-leaning content, as he will ban anyone even remotely or casually talking of committing violence on awful fascists and robber barons.
Agreed. Wish there would be a political filter similar to the nsfw one. In that way you wouldn’t have to isolate yourself to certain subs
Tell me all about the political shit going on mate! I blocked them, keywords + communities. Lots of USA communities that never end but populate for no reason.
You can set default subs to show, and block communities. It’s much nicer to look at the news when you want to rather than all the time.
Block politics and join femcelmemes.
The world is actively imploding. You desperately want to put your head in the sand, but you’re bored down there, so you now want to pull your head out and have the rest of us maintain your childish illusion while you ignore objective reality. Grow up and scroll beyond posts you don’t need
You’re also showing yourself as confidently ignorant as you’re angry, but also obviously aren’t filtering certain communities or keywords that your sensitive eyes can’t handle with your app. Again, grow up.
or they just want to avoid people like you. because you know, it’s insufferable to be lectured how you such by random strangers who just want to go on about catastrophe when most likely they are living a very cushy life, hence they need to be obsessed with politics in a wholly negative way, because that is the only major drama/tension in their life.
That’s all you have are insults? Grow up.
Lemmy was created because of Reddit censoring political content.
If you don’t wanna see political stuff go to a different website.
The above is not a value judgement. If I did not want to be exposed to the sun and the public then I wouldn’t go to a park. If I did not want to be exposed to loud car sounds and screaming fans I wouldn’t go to the racetrack. It’s okay that you don’t want to see political stuff (you should think critically about what you think is political and why). You don’t need to go to lemmy or any other fediverse thing. You can just be a Redditor.
lovingly, with approval and understanding go away.
I’ve been on lemmy since before it even federated, so I’m happy with the left-wing political and tech focused topics of discussion available.
That said, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want to get away from monolithic social media and also want the sort of “non-political” content they are used to getting. There’s no reason they can’t do both, and I think we should encourage federated social media and direct people away from corporate social media at every opportunity. If people can comfortably get their memes and news and hobby discussions on the fediverse, that’s only a good thing. Ownership of that needs to be taken away from Reddit.
I just want to get away from self-righteous agenda posters. who are so indoctrinated they think everyone else is exactly like them and if they aren’t, they are terrible awful people.
it’s not even a political thing, there are many folks in hobby and other groups that approach life this way, trying to shove their opinions down everyone else’s throats and demonizing them for not agreeing, and/or playing the victim when someone pushes back against their shitty ‘i know better than you’ bullshit.
I think I sympathize completely. I find even people I ostensibly agree with on almost everything to sometimes be obnoxious. I think different people are looking for different things when it comes to using these platforms and this sometimes leads to poor results.
it’s just a general attitude towards life. some folks don’t mind other people doing stuff differently than them, others can’t stand it and take it as a personal attack on themselves.
like, i remember when I was car-shopping a decade ago and people got mad at me for not buying the car they wanted me to buy. it was wild.
They are used to getting “non-political” content because Reddit kicked out the “political” people and closed the “political” subs.
Going to the place that those people and communities now reside and complaining that everything feels “political” is ridiculous, but there might be good reasons why a person would do it, like you said.
You’re right that it’s not unreasonable to ask for what they’re asking for. That’s why I tried my god damnedest to clearly and kindly explain that this might not be the right place for them. Not everywhere needs to be for everyone. It’s not an insult to tell someone they’re looking for the library, this is the bus terminal.
Others are espousing different ways to harness the technology using blocks and a subscription feed. If someone believes that an alternative to corporate social media should be for everyone (an explicitly political belief!) then that will be borne out by successful block and sub use. The user might also not succeed at using those tools. In that case they don’t have to stay. They can recognize that they want the curated, “nonpolitical” experience of Reddit. I am not making a judgement of them for wanting that, only recommending they go and get what they want.
even if I agree politics should be discussed more openly than what reddit allows, dude we need to make this space more welcoming, not telling people to go away.
.ml users think they are being welcoming and kind when they harass and insult other users.
The op is welcome here. When they don’t want to be here they’re welcome to not be.
They can leave. It’s not a bad thing. It’s not an admonition or reprisal for me to say that.
