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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just ban political communities
I was so fed up with IG and explored mastodon/pixelfed for a bit, and it felt like a lot of weight off my shoulder when looking at the feed(s) knowing that there is no machinery feeding me straightup BS. The “feed” was behaving exactly as it used to during the days when RSS was a thing (remember those?).
like… wow… I have control over this! and I don’t have to spend too much energy filtering off BS. That convinced to explore alternatives like Lemmy.
I joined today. :)
Welcome! Just FYI, lemmy.world blocks the piracy instance (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
can you elaborate? or should I assume that means I can’t follow “communities” from privacy instances?
*piracy
Yes, that’s one of the restrictions. I also think you can’t see your users’ comments. (perhaps posts too, I am uncertain)
If you’re not interested in following something there or it’s not a topic you’re interested in, it’s alright. You could always create another account somewhere else or browse their instance anonymously.
The good thing about Lemmy is that you can always switch to another instance in the future. I started for a few months on .world and then moved to lemmy.blahaj.zone.
Welcome! I hope you have a great time here and I’m glad people are moving :)
They only specifically block the piracy community on db0’s instance, to my knowledge. It’s definitely not a full instance ban anymore
It was such a weird argument to block it as well. The justification given was that they were concerned that they would be held legally responsible if users saw piracy content on their website.
It was such a bizarre argument. It seemed more like they had decided on personal grounds that they wanted to block it, and then tried to come up with some kind of external justification. It was the lack of intellectual honesty that pissed me off more than the fact that they’d done it.
Ooooops, I didn’t realise @yessikg@lemmy.blahaj.zone meant _piracy_🏴☠️ it was late when I replied.😅
Anyway, thanks for letting me know!
Yeah, just wanted to let you know since that instance is very active and has several big communities
Open source, tunable locally running content discovery and search with crowd sourced share preference models (like, people who like x probably like y)
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
at least everyone sees the same thing when they click that button. tiktok will literally send you so far down a niche that you’ll try to talk to your friend about some huge trend you’ve been seeing for a week with millions of views and they’ll have never heard of it before because their feed was giving them an entirely different trend
NOOOO! (Angry yelling)
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.
I’m currently trying to figure out how to use RSS for this reason.
*raises hand*
Uh, this is a Lemmy’s sir
I really enjoy being introduced to new things based on what other people like me enjoy.
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”.
