It seems anytime I try to check out Mastodon it is always some negative political view or affiliation of why X, Y & Z is bad. Is this just what most people like boosting or is it a sign of botting to push negativity over the more positive headlines?
I do understand I can switch to any Mastodon instance I want and stick to a small community, however I like keeping up with trending topics in the world. Maybe the most popular accounts in the Mastodon community likes to rise up pitchforks every minute.
Most of what’s happening in politics is bad
You’re not wrong.
A lot of the people who have fled Twitter to Mastodon are the most… online, with strong political opinions.
Even though I usually agree with them, I find it exhausting and the opposite of fun to be bombarded with outrage politics 24/7, so I’m pretty careful about the accounts I follow.
Same. I stay away from #Explore and just keep to my feed of people I actually follow. And I make sure to unfollow those who are too stressful to hear from constantly.
I agree with almost all the of all politics all the time people who constantly post negative things, but it’s too tiring to read them, especially since knowing about it does me no good and I can’t do anything about it anyway. I already vote and donate as much as I can, and I live in a Blue state so anything outside of my area’s just not possible for me to influence.
I’ve found it’s better just to ignore it and focus on positive things that make my life better.
It’s the worst part of social media, in my opinion. If you’re ingesting that stuff 24/7, you’d think the world was ending every week.
We aren’t built to process that volume of information without it warping our perception.
It’s why I’ve gone back to reading an old school newspaper. The format naturally limits the amount of bad news they can fit in a day, and it has regular sections on art, culture, philosophy, nature etc.
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That sounds a lot like twitter
I guess that is what happens with a Twitter replacement, still the same Twitter community.
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I don’t know. I picked some hashtags to follow, and now my feed is full of cats.
Mine is all amiga and Commodore 64 games. Not the exact scenario I was expecting when following #retrogaming
Yeah, not what I’d expect either. The lack of an algorithm is one of the things I’m not crazy about on there. It took me months to get into Mastodon at first because I got tired of the complaints about Elon. I only know one person on the platform too. But I do like the cat pictures.
Wait, what did you expect when you followed #retrogaming?
I expected more console games that 80s computers, not that I’m complaining. Just not a world I was familiar with
“Trending” is going to show you the topics that are getting the most engagement. Political content almost always gets a lot of engagement, because people will argue back and forth with each other, and each new reply will boost that post further up the ranking. It’s just the nature of that particular sorting method.
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You have a word list I could borrow?
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I fucking love you. Seriously thanks.
This is perfect. My current list just contains 10 different ways to block posts about covid.
Lobotomizing yourself is faster.
Glad to hear it from someone with experience!
Nah, I’m not brainwashed into thinking that politics is intrinsically evil.
Nah, you can’t aim the icepick properly yourself. Believe me, I’ve tried.
The front page of lemmy.world has a similar tone. Frankly I have enough problems to deal with in my own life - to willingly browse something designed to piss you off and remind you that people you disagree with exist is just pointlessly distressing. Yet this is what the majority of Lemmy and Mastodon people are choosing to do if the numbers are to be believed.
The best way to follow news is RSS or via an aggregator. I recommend SPIDR, which organizes stories from different publications under one shared headline. You can click the flag in the top left to pick the news from your country.
RSS has been the best way to get your news for like 20 years, but most web browser have built-in RSS feeders these days, plus there’s always just plain old bookmarks
I follow digital art hashtag and now my feed full of art and furry art. But it’s better than looking at US politics posts that i never understand.
Same, digitalart and also pixelart fill a lot of my timeline.
How do you follow hashtags?
In the default Mastodon web UI you can simply click on a hashtag and then press the “Follow hashtag” button. If you want to follow a hashtag that’s not showing up in your feed yet then you can search for it and then click on it in the search results. If you don’t see the “follow hashtag” button that might mean that your instance is running a very old version of Mastodon. Hashtag follows were added in version 4.0 which came out at the end of last year.
One caveat is that hashtags follows only show posts that “make it” to your instance either because they were created locally or because another user on your instances followed the person who posted them. In practice being on an instance with a sizable user base or an instance that’s oriented towards your interests should work well.
It’s currently not possible on the official Android app (unsure about iOS) but you can do so on the website and third party apps. I’m using Tusky on Android as it reminiscent of one of my favorite dead apps Flamingo for Twitter.
This is why I can never get into microblogging/Twitter-type platforms. Character limits and one-click reposting mean that what little discourse you get is shallow, and ragebait is consistently pushed to the top.
I’m not going to say that Lemmy or (especially) Reddit completely avoid this, but you generally get much more insightful conversation and can opt-in to political communities.
There was a thread on !asklemmy@lemmy.ml recently asking people for their unpopular political opinions, and it actually wasn’t a total shitshow!
By “not a total shitshow” do you mean that it actually contained unpopular opinions or do you mean it was not filled with extremists.
Actual unpopular (but not extremist) opinions.
It’s easier to bitch about what’s wrong than to actively do something to make it better.
I mean plenty of people bitching are doing what’s within their power. This is a reductionist and bad faith argument
Everyone has the ability to change the things around them. People want to change the world. That is an unrealistic goal to start with. What you can change directly and immediately is your family/household. Then you can move to your neighborhood. As you change the things closest to you, then you can slowly move out to larger things.
Going on a worldwide platform and bitching may make you feel better, but it does nothing to change things and just makes people avoid you.
So every single action you ever take is to affect change directly? Seems that you’re not affecting change by posting here. Sounds like you’re bitching about people bitching. That does nothing. Kinda makes me wanna avoid you.
Let people bitch. It’s not hurting you in any way, and might even raise awareness of issues to people who aren’t familiar with a particular issue.
Because it’s one or the other. This dichotomy isn’t even slightly false.
Well said, unfortunate reality.
I found the better way to use Mastodon was to follow users/hashtags of interest and then filtering out most of the topics which produce ragebait. It means my feed isn’t as busy but I also get none of the ragebait.
That was my strategy too: follow hashtags of interest, and as I identify users who consistently say interesting things, follow them as well. Occasionally poke into “Local” and ferret out one or two more interesting users (and a whole bunch of users to block!). Oh, and make VERY heavy use of filters: filtering on hashtags, chiefly, but also key words that tend to get associated with asshats.
Just like any discourse on politics ever. It’s less common to hear people praising a decision than criticising.
On a tangent, that’s why it’s important to loudly say when you agree with something, rather than quietly assume it’s just normal. Regardless of which party it comes from. Politicians are very sensitive to public perception.
That’s why I’m always arguing for higher taxes. I feel like not enough people are in favor of higher taxes.
I’m with you. Zero taxes on the bottom 50%. Progressively higher taxes as you go up that scale until you crack 100% for the tippy-top.
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I thought the selling point behind most Twitter like services is that it’s focused on negative positioning. E.g. things that are negative focused get more attention and engagement
People have been trained by corporatist ad-click-driven "angagement"1-oriented antisocial media that all online communication is rage-fuelled.
No, wait. This doesn’t explain BITNET, FidoNet, USENET, etc. which predate such antisocial media by decades…
New theory: people online tend toward being assholes because they’re not in imminent danger of taking a punch to the nose for it.
1 “angagement”: a portmanteau of “anger” and “engagement”
