This little instance has been great, but Lemmy and the fediverse in general is really dragging on me.
Every. Single. Thread. has the word “capitalism” or “Trump” in it somewhere. I’m sick to death of it. Even though I agree with a lot of the sentiment, the erosion of the middle class, the concentration of wealth, the consolidation of media, the “you will own nothing and be happy” mentality permeating the consumer space. In many ways that’s why I left Reddit and joined Lemmy, but dang it that doesn’t mean I want to talk about absolutely nothing else.
And the only communities devoid of politics are also devoid of content. I do a lot of worldbuilding stuff, and I’ve tried to make !worldbuilding@lemmy.world more active, but sometimes I feel like I’m the only poster. Then I look at r/worldbuilding, and there’s a glut of really interesting posts showcasing people’s imagination and creativity, and nary a mention of Musk or Epstein in sight.
And then there’s the tech side of things. Hope you like Linux, cuz that’s all you’re going to see. And if you dare suggest that Linux may not be the right choice for your blind grandmother, you get eviscerated in the comments.
Granted, Reddit itself used to have a similar problem. It attracted a very specific type of user (neckbeards) and the experience wasn’t great if you weren’t one, but ironically the same popularization of Reddit that lead to its platform decay also solved this homogeneity problem. Similarly, Tankies and their ilk seem to flock to Lemmy, explaining the tone of the discourse.
Am I crazy? Anyone else feel the same? Did I knock over a hornet’s nest and this post is going to end up deleted?
Many clients let you filter out keywords.
I know, as do the web regular web frontends. But I can’t overstate how pervasive ideology is on here. And it doesn’t even show up in an organic way, either.
And here’s another one. I just wanted to talk about pokemon :( Lemmings always gotta be “on”.
Block .ml
I feel like I’m coming out of the woodwork to plug my app, but I swear I only do it when I think it may be helpful, lol.
Not sure if you’ve ever used or heard of the Tesseract web frontend for lemmy, but it’s been my pet project for going on 3 years now. The beta version that’s on the hosted instance now has really granular filtering as well as community grouping, and you can apply filter policies to community groups. Overhauling and turbo-charging the filtering is the main feature I’ve been working on in this version, actually.
So, for example, you could put your Pokemon communities into a group and create a filter policy that applies to all of its member communities. You could then filter/hide keyword matches, specific users, regexes for users, instances (anyone from a specific instance), or even entire platforms (hide content from anyone from Mastodon or Piefed, for example).
Basically, take the people that are “always on” but not so insufferable as to merit a block and filter them out only where you want a specific “vibe”.
The version with the new filtering stuff is only available on the hosted instance, but I am on the home stretch toward releasing it so anyone can install it (maybe with the long weekend and non-stop rain, I can wrap this up for release 🤞).
Not sure if Lemmy Radio offers it, but once I wrap it up, maybe they’ll be open to setting it up for users there.
Group your Pokemon communities
Filter out and hide any users you’ve tagged as “always on”.
This effectively blocks them only in communities that belong to this group. Also, if you’re hiding (as opposed to filtering), notifications will be suppressed and hidden in the inbox so it’s like they never replied to you. However, unlike blocking, you’ll still see them and get replies from them elsewhere.
Note: The user-tagging is still work-in-progress and isn’t available in the beta yet, but you can add users individually or by regex.
Use regex patterns to filter users (useful for people with lots and lots of alts with the same username)
Edit: Sorry, forgot to link the hosted instance. It’s at https://tesseract.dubvee.org/ Despite being under a subdomain of my instance, that’s the official hosted version and can connect to any Lemmy server. I just didn’t want to spend money on another dedicated domain lol.
Useless when the keywords are in images.
I have a vast majority of communities blocked. I only come here to shitpost and occasionally talk about 90s TV.
I’d encourage you to continue to post about worldbuilding. Not for other people or the sake of the community, but because you enjoy it. But if it’s really not giving you what you desire, then it’s okay not to stick around on a platform that doesn’t bring you joy.
I got banned from a whole community today because I stood up for real leftist values against a violent Maoist and their revisionist propaganda. There’s too much hate and violence flying around the fediverse. I came here to find like minded people and all I find are the same assholes wearing different colored shirts.
Am I crazy? Anyone else feel the same? Did I knock over a hornet’s nest and this post is going to end up deleted?
Not at all. You’re spot on. Granted, I do like Linux and Star Trek so many of my bases are largely covered even though I have countless users and communities blocked.
I enjoy the world building stuff but am just a lurker. Same with a lot of other non-politics/news/rage hobby stuff. I’ve been trying to make an effort to post more lately, and only interesting stuff that’s not just a rage-jerk, but I don’t want to overdo it and spam or post low effort stuff just to be posting.
Unfortunately, your observations aren’t new, and I’ve had the same thoughts for a while. It’s something of a feedback loop because the more people who don’t want to be here for the constant rage end up leaving, and the place just distills further. The only reason I’ve stuck around as long as I have is mostly in hopes of this just being a growing pain. I came here because I wanted to be here not because I got banned from everywhere else (which seems to be a significant portion of the userbase here, sadly).
All I can say is, if you can stand it, keep trying to be the change you want to be.
I think Reddit still has merit when it comes to niche communities. Lemmy doesn’t have the user base to support the breadth of communities Reddit does, which is why I still use it for some specific subreddits I already follow. But when it comes to randomly scrolling posts from communities I’m not already a part of I’ll never go back to Reddit.
Have you tried talking Lemmy up at r/worldbuilding? Most people don’t even realize an alternative to Reddit exists
I think Reddit still has merit when it comes to niche communities
Yeah, that’s probably what I miss the most. There’s a sub for dogs, but also a sub for Labradors specifically. Not only that, but there’s a sub each for chocolate, black, and yellow labs, and all of them are lively and active. There are active subs that spawned from inside jokes from other subs like TalesFromCaveSupport from TalesFromTechSupport. There are niches within niches within niches.
You don’t have to commit to anything. I use both. The writing communities on here don’t really work for me that well and the general population of reddit (and their god-awful app) don’t work for me well there. I just kinda bounce around to wherever I’m most interested when I feel like it.
Personally, I think it’s good to have a variety of sources if you’re gonna do the social media thing anyway. Each of them have their own subculture that sucks in the extremes, but for a visit now and again they’re not terrible.
You’re right. I know I’m being hypocritical, joining a platform for ideological reasons, then complaining when everyone else talks about ideology. People who join the fediverse are self-selecting.
But I actually joined Lemmy before I quit Reddit. I made an account on here during the Reddit APIcolypse of 2023, but only deleted my Reddit account that fall after realizing I was addicted to it. In some ways I was expecting a slower drip of content here on Lemmy compared to Reddit, but didn’t expect the quality to be so dubious. I’ve been telling myself I should probably make another Reddit account. I’ve been having issues at work that could probably be solved with a quick post on a relevant subreddit, but I’ve stubbornly refused to go crawling back to the social media I swore I’d rid myself of.
Configure these and the Lemmy experience is enhanced tenfold:
Does blocking an instance also block users from that instance or just posts from those instances showing up in my feed?
That’s a great question, I don’t know. It may be client dependent. It for sure blocks posts, though in the client I use (Voyager), I think it lets comments through as I think I’ve seen them, but I’m not sure.
E: You got me curious and I learned that it does not block comments, at least in Voyager:
