I’ve been off and on with the Fediverse for sometime now. It’s a relatively friendly place full of fellow nerds, but with a few caveats…
My feeds seem very focused on hard information be it Gaza, tech companies doing bad things, or people pitchforking about the lastest big bad in digital privacy. This is all well and good, but it does get a bit tired after a while. Seeing the samey stuff post after post by academic types makes me more informed but also mentally draining.
Where’s the fun? On Facebook and Instagram I see light fluffy popcorn type posts of people reminiscing over Nintendo games or reels of cockatiels being cockatiels. It’s fun to scroll and interact. Here it feels like I’m in a classroom, and people, while friendly, do get quite hostile if you don’t like Linux or Star Trek.
As a leftist I like it here because it’s my bubble of people, but I’d like to see the fedi let its hair down a bit. It’s okay to talk about stuff other than infosec, privacy guides, distros, and Gaza.
Reddit began in a similar way - being very tech focused until it started to become much more mainstream.
Block instances which have nothing you want (foreign languages, for me)
Block communities spamming gaza / war / techbro
I like to browse new across all instances, and block rather than only view subscriptions
I have the same approach of browsing all and blocking what I don’t want as I come across it. Which in my case, happens to be mostly anime and shitposting communities.
Block communities spamming gaza / war / techbro
I would agree with you if those communities were/are created to post content about gaza / war / techbro. But in most cases, those communities are generic, about news and technology, so when you block them, you also block other content that is not about gaza / war / techbro.
a lot of apps support key word blocking
Dont forget engagement. IMO best part of fediverse.
Yeah Lemmy, besides news and technology, is very quiet and I think it suffers from having communities fractured between instances, so niche interests get even less traffic than they would on Reddit. But my Mastodon feed is always busy and interesting. If it isn’t you’re not following the right people yet. I recommend some hashtag searches for things you’re interested in.
Lemmy really needs a concept of a “super-community”, some way to group different communities together and have that grouping be subscribeable. Maybe creating a post within a super-community will give the user the ability to automatically cross-post to all the individual communities, although this could be abuseable.
/kbin has got Collections, and PieFed has got topics. You may check either out.
Big agree with this. One of the clients I messed with had a feature like this and it’s really nice. But we need something server-side to allow federated communities to pull from each other to create a river from separate streams as it were.
I follow lots of the the same communities across instances and that means often I’m seeing repeated posts, sometimes from different authors just to get the aggregate of things. This would be a huge boon to the usability too.
I recommend some keyword filters. I use them to reduce certain topics from my feed, specifically about certain wars or politicians or celebrities. I did the same thing on reddit to filter out some of the “awareness” campaigns where everyone posted about the FCC chair to every single sub.
I also just browse local communities instead of the entire fediverse. This defeats the purpose of the fediverse, but it drastically reduces the number of duplicate and NSFW communities. I then mute the communities I don’t want to see. I’ll also mute the hyper specific communities that usually have complete overlap with the more general community, i.e. dogs and dogpictures.
It takes some work to get your feed to your liking, but it’s worth it in the end. There’s still far less content available than on reddit, but the amount of quality content feels similar.
You’re our hero!
How do you stay in a community, but filter content you don’t want through keywords?
Honestly I don’t even bother subscribing to comminuted. Communities for me are opt-out via muting rather than opt-in via subscriptions. I still see posts from the news community even though I have several Gaza keywords filtered out.
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Also, with no built-in mechanism for embedding, say, youtube or peertube videos, Lemmy just is a primarily text-driven site like reddit used to be, and while there will be reams of text written about such a disaster… the video drastically speaks for itself. So the dearth of video on Lemmy, especially embedded video that allows you to watch without leaving Lemmy is holding it back in certain arenas.
Video storage costs a lot, it’s not a surprise Lemmy chose not to support it, but here’s hoping maybe someday they add the ability to embed videos and have them function in-page.
The Photon UI for lemmy can play embedded videos.
Lemmy is a little slow sometimes, but I’ve started to have the opposite problem on Mastodon. I need to weed out some hashtags or something because I can’t keep up anymore.
Even back on twitter days I never got used to it because there’s just so much content everywhere that I feel that I can’t follow any topic properly and I lose all interest. In my case the concept of microblogging is not a right fit for me.
No kidding! I was just thinking this morning that my Mastodon feed has gone bonkers lately and it is getting harder to keep up! I suppose that is a good problem to have but I only follow a few tags. I am, however, enjoying Mastodon way more than I ever did twitter.
I see this as a positive. Instead of being fed content to keep me engaged by an algorithm until I suddenly realize the day is almost over and I didn’t really enjoy myself, I reach a point where I feel like I’m done for the day then I make plans, play a game, read, etc.
Now I read the news, fuck around on lemmy a bit, then actually get on with a “real” day.
Yeah I don’t really relate to the complaint because why does all your fun have to come from a single website? Does your online content have to be a one-stop shop? I just hop around Lemmy, Tildes, read sports news, maybe watch some cool videos on Youtube, etc etc. And when I’m bored with internet, I have other stuff IRL to do. Yeah I’m just not treating Lemmy like an endless scroll feed like Reddit or Instagram. I just check out what’s new (I might pop in a few times a day), participate if I want, and move on.
After i scroll my subscribed communities, if i have extra time i scroll all. I often find something new to follow - art, cats, or that new music lyrics/AI art one that i still can’t figure out.
jUsT mAkE coNtEnT
Not a perfect solution by any means, but you can block communities you have no interest in.
Youtube Shorts give me Brainrot but I can’t stop watching them. I don’t know what they did to the algorithm, but it perfectly captures my attention.
They’re the absolute best along with Insta reels.
Give it time. The porn on lemmy is growing exponentially, so the more varied content will start trickling in. My guess is roughly 3 more months before the memes really start to pick up
People on here and on mastodon are really pessimistic overall I’ve found. I still need to go to Twitter despite all the bots and engagement farming going on these days if I want to learn about new product releases or the newest possibilities of the newest technology that was released just yesterday.
I had to leave a Mastodon instance because it was about activism, gaza and politics the whole fucking day. So I perfectly understand what you feel. But I think there are ways and/or servers where everybody can feel comfortable. The mastodon server where I’m on right now, people talks about US stuff the whole day, and I’m very annoyed because of that because I don’t give a damn shit about US. But the admin is cool, people support Ukraine, and I follow funny stuff too.
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Yeah, where’s the fun? There’s no posts about owls/bats/invertebrates/cats/dogs, no cooking or food posts, no pictures of people knitting socks, nobody asking general questions, no articles and pictures about space, no discussion around movies/tv/books, nobody ever posts about gaming of any kind, there’s no memes to be found anywhere, no poems or short stories, no digital/traditional/AI art.
For some reason browsing news/politics/technology always seems to revolve around depressing and infuriating topics which is different from every other platform.
Your snark is the perfect embodiment of why people leave the fedi.
I’m not the one complaining about being bored and requesting that everyone else amuse me. All those things I listed are things that are regularly posted so what’s the issue?
