It seems like no matter how I scroll I find bad news. I know lots of things are happening but I just want funny memes and interesting stories.
I used to be able to get this back in the day on the Reddit app feed, but here the all page is always just depressing stuff. Back then, there was news and stuff but like it felt more balanced in the all feed. I could get bad stuff but lots of interesting stuff too .
I find myself engaging less and less and just avoiding Lemmy more and more since I know the moment I open it I’ll get whacked with more depressing stuffs.
I don’t want politics or world news or really even memes about that stuff anymore. Heck even tech news is depressing. I just want simple scrolling of fun content. Idk it’s just hard to describe.
Does anyone else feel this way about their Lemmy experience?
I remember an old post about someone getting AM radio from their sink (probably from Reddit back in the day). That type of stuff is so much cooler than my feed.
To that end: any recommended active communities on Lemmy with that type of stuff?
Does anyone else feel this way about their Lemmy experience?
The out of the box experience is not great (neither is Reddit, if you’re asking me, it’s at least as depressing to see the amount of trash/low effort posts on their home page). But once I switched to ‘Subscribed’ only view, things were already much better since I was only seeing content I was interested in (aka no politics or drama of any sort).
As already suggested: [email protected] is good place to see what’s new, also there is [email protected]
Most importantly, Lemmy is not Reddit for many reasons but this one is more directly related to your question: it’s much smaller (to give you an idea, I moderate a journaling community we recently reached… 300 members (of which less than a handful is active), whereas the Reddit journaling community is 2 Million+ ;). So, there is a lot less content posted on Lemmy. Back on Reddit, I was mostly a commenter (barely posting anything new myself) but I quickly realized that if I wanted to see stuff I was interested in on Lemmy I better start… posting myself ;)
[user banned for having an opinion that diverges from the group]
[user banned for having an opinion that diverges from the group]
Is this something I’m supposed to react to? If so, sorry I don’t get it.
It’s just a bad joke about ‘the out of the box experience not being great’.
My bad. I should have understood. Even I, filtering out all the crap, have heard of that, well, that situation ;)
If you’re into crosswords and word games, there are [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
You are 100% correct, negative news has a greater impact on people than positive: https://assets.csom.umn.edu/assets/71516.pdf
Media sites know this, and use it to drive engagement:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01538-4 https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/social-media-facebook-twitter-politics-b1870628.html
And so, negative headlines are getting worse: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0276367
But negative news is addictive and psychologically damaging: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/why-we-worry/202009/the-psychological-impact-negative-news
So it’s important to try and stay positive:
https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/benefits-of-good-news
If you want a break from the constant negativity, here are some sites that report specifically on positive news:
- https://www.goodgoodgood.co/
- https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/
- https://fixthenews.com/
- https://positivenewsfoundation.org/
- https://www.onlygoodnewsdaily.com/
And here’s 35 more: https://news.feedspot.com/good_news_websites/
Some communities on Lemmy you might be interested in:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- https://lemmy.world/c/hopeposting
- https://lemmy.world/c/worldinprogress
- https://lemmy.world/c/climatehope
Remember, realistic optimism is important and, unlike what some might have you believe, is not the same as blissful ignorance or ‘burying your head in the sand’: https://www.learning-mind.com/realistic-optimism-blind-positivity/
https://www.centreforoptimism.com/realisticoptimism
And doesn’t mean you must stay uninformed on current affairs: https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/how-to-stop-doom-scrolling
https://goodable.co/blog/tips-for-balancing-positive-and-negative-news/
kbin.social is dead btw… if you post there it won’t federate and only people on your instance will see your post.
Noted, thanks
Did you subscribe to news and politics communities? I’d recommend to unsubscribe, then. The more you tailor your feed to your interests, the more you’re going to get what you’re looking for.
You can block alot of political content pretty easily through an inbuilt function
Have you considered halting the decline of democracy? Then people won’t post depressing facts.
Or you filter by keywords. One of the two things needs to happen for you not to be exposed to negativity.
Not all of us live in the US.
Make a community, specify no politics in the rules? Heck, this community excludes US politics in the rules.
And yet somehow we have questions that revolve around US politics geopolitical depressants.
You should definitely report any posts that break the community’s rules
You can report them, they get removed
Some days I just go and block all political and general news communities I see. I usually unblock a few some days later.
Why don’t you just keep away from c/all and stick to your subscribed communities?
To discover new communities, I suggest subscribing to c/newcommunities
besides [email protected] there’s also [email protected] and [email protected]
plus you can always just look through the “communities” listing – in the web interface it’s at the top of the page, just select “communities” and “all”.
That’s my approach - once in a while I take a peek at /all, get stressed out and quickly retreat to my curated home again.
I’ve taken a bit of a different approach. I’ve been using a keyword filter to remove posts that contain any words I don’t care to read about. So no posts about trump, Elon, RFK, cyber trucks, etc.
I am not here to get that kind of news, I do that separately with the news sources I can trust and verify. Otherwise any tabloid or sensational opinion piece can potentially try to ruin my day all in the name of getting clicks
This is the way. I blocked keywords relating to Trump, Musk and the far right extremist party in my own country the other day and while some stuff still gets through it has made Lemmy significantly more pleasant to browse.
I can read about that stuff elsewhere if I really want to, but honestly I think we might not even be in this mess if the media didn’t amplify those voices every time they said or did something outrageous.
I implemented the filters using the Voyager app, but I think most Lemmy clients have similar options. On desktop my instance offers Tesseract which also allows filtering by keywords.
I do think it’s important to keep up to date. Even discounting the things I can’t control getting through my filters, there have been things that have directly affected my family and their jobs because of things Trump has done and I did not know about until after the fact. There is a line somewhere that you should be aware of, or else you may just be burying your head in the sand.
Separately, I use boost for Lemmy on android. Thank you for telling me about tesseract. I haven’t been as successful with any keyword filters in browser
Voyager also has a web app interface that has keyword filtering which works well for me. https://vger.app/
20 active communities which are not politics, news, memes or tech
For anyone on dbzer0, or who already have link redirection set up: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/35001146
I just block a lot of communities like that. It’s easy in the Voyager app to do this on Lemmy. I also have some filters set up for some of the common words that are used in the doom and gloom posts like what you’re talking about.
It helps out a lot to decrease a lot of the overly negative stuff.
If you find yourself wanting some of it back, maybe you could create a second account that you could log into as you feel it is needed? Voyager allows me to switch between accounts very easily. Or it did, I haven’t had a secondary account in some time, but I did have that function last time I needed it.
Yeah lemmy has bit too much political content. Americans seem very obsessed with it. I just kept blocking all of them and now my feed is pretty free of political nonsense. If I want that kind of content i’ll just read the news paper or go to my news feed of choice
To be fair, a large slice of the user base is in the US and currently everything is collapsing around us. It should come as no surprise that we complain about it a lot. The mods of various communities could certainly enforce rules more; e.g. in shitposting or memes, remove any political content. It would help the situation.
Lol than your country has been collapsing for the last 2+ years, cus it’s always dominated by politics on lemmy.
It’s a difficult balance to strike, since enforcing content also feels like going against the foss ethos… It’s tricky. But just keep promoting Lemmy and the fediverse and some day we will have a more balanced experience
I agree. And yes, the last 2+ years have been a political shit show, because we were scared shitless of what has now happened.
Unfortunately there’s almost nothing left once you’ve blocked all that. I’m close to leaving. No one will miss me, whatever. Occasionally I have a nice interaction though.
Won’t argue with that, 70% is Linux and Politics combined. I do enjoy the “small scale forum” feel, but indeed after scrolling for 30 minutes you will probaly have consumed most of the content for the coming 48hours. After that, shamefully admitting, it’s back to reddit and tiktok.
I’ve been using as an impetus to pick up a book instead, or do something constructive. I get my shot of dopamine, but since it has an end I am forced to do other things.
I’m in the same place. Avoiding politics is not only for my mental health.
In my case, for personal as well as professional reasons, I particularly need to avoid communities where advocating for political violence is tolerated (and in some even condoned.)
I blocked all the politics-specific or adjacent communities, but most of Lemmy seems to want everything to be about politics.
That’s way too toxic for me so I have to detach from Lemmy. I deleted my main account and I’m going to come back in a few months to see if it has calmed down.
i blocked every single news and politics communities, as well as all the “*** infuriating” ones, it has drastically improved the content of my timeline :)
It will also significantly reduce the amount of content being displayed on my feed
sure, but i feel we can’t escape “news” anyway, so i don’t mind having less of it in one place
Removed by mod
It should make less depressing content emerge
Well that’s the dream innit?
Isn’t it the whole idea? ;)
Less content ≠ less procrastination
Less content ≠ less procrastination
And?
English is not my first language (so, looking at your pseudo, by all means help me improve my grammar my dear officer) but it seemed to me the OP was looking to remove some crap from their timeline, not to procrastinate less:
It seems like no matter how I scroll I find bad news. I know lots of things are happening but I just want funny memes and interesting stories.
Yeah, but in response to OP’s post i made the comment that there’s less content for me to procrastinate with. I’m mainly referring to myself
Free content:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus et massa sagittis velit condimentum placerat at et dui. Sed et vehicula ex. Integer et risus ac dolor volutpat fringilla.
My wife was killed by a lorem ipsum you insensitive bastard.
Block news subs.
Mind you, news subs are depressing right now for a reason.
