With Reddit just announcing ai mods for sub reddits I think it’s finally time I fully give it up. I’ve been slowly trying to transition back into the fediverse but damn is it hard sometimes. Listen I have left leaning politics but does every other post have to be about some political shit on the all tab, I feel like I’m forced into this box that is my subscribed feed or I have to actively search out new communities because all is just a political circle jerk that I don’t care about. Not to mention the moment I came back I saw a fucking flow chart on the instances drama of the week. If I wasn’t so dedicated to dropping Reddit I think the average Joe would have left by now seeing all of this. And YES I have been trying to be the change I want to see if you check my profile I regularly post in meme subs non political just funny memes to be like “lmao” and people can move about their day. I’m not saying there ISNT other type of content on lemmy or piefed it just feels like the stuff that floats to the top is political
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Delete the All feed! It’s just stupid. Subscribe to what you like. Maybe have a short glimpse at the All feed on a biweekly basis for 5min, but that’s it.
I default to subscribed+scaled, and I check all+top 6-24 hours when I feel like staying on top of news. It works pretty well.
How do you find what you like? I sew, and do dollhouse miniatures, but I haven’t seen any of that on the fediverse yet.
Be the change you want to see.
For now you could post to [email protected] which has a little bit of everything. I’d love to check out your projects.
Ehhh, the sidebar makes it sound like a super depressing place, but thanks!
Fair enough.
Check out lemmyverse.net to find communities. If you set your home instance (top right, button with a home icon, enter
slrpnk.netin your case), then it will open the page where you can subscribe directly. There’s a longer guide here with more tips: https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/threadiverse/finding-communitiesIf you aren’t sure what you want to subscribe to, there is a list pinned on [email protected]
@[email protected] had an amazing list of non-politics communities that unfortunately I can’t seem to find right now.Once Lemmy releases the big v1 update, both Lemmy and Piefed will have multi-communities that you can subscribe to in order to get a lot of similar content.
As for your requests specifically, check out these. Some are more relevant than others, and the small ones grow as interested people post to them:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected] (as an example of a community that grew over time)
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
Slrpnk also has a full list of every community on it and I love that
Also, not who you’re responding to but I just subbed to all of those, thank you!
No problem!
The list is pinned on [email protected] !
That’s the one I forgot to check 🤦 I looked in [email protected]
Thanks!
Yeah, unfortunately the Fediverse isn’t as big as I’d like it to be. I can’t find people to talk about some of my interests, either. I’ll occasionally put in keywords on https://lemmyverse.net/communities , have a look at PieFed’s curated feeds and topics (Edit: another topic list)… But there’s probably just not enough people here who are into miniatures…
I just went looking for something similar after getting into battletech. I know thats too niche for fedi but I was hoping to find a comm for minis/painting/wargaming or similar catchall.
There’s [email protected]
Sub to all the new com communities, and keep your eyes peeled for any links to interesting stuff in the comments and then immediately subscribe if it seems at all interesting.
But the reality is that niche comms don’t really fire on Lemmy yet, so you’ll mainly find stuff that’s either mass appeal or nerd/leftist stuff.
I tried to create a community about trees (the wooden kind) when I joined. It’s still here but after a lot of effort posting there I realized there just wasn’t enough of an audience to keep organic discussions going at all times. Same with my local geographic area.
Hopefully someday there will be more growth and these can start to become more viable.
The trouble, I think, is that even Reddit wasn’t Reddit (as we think of it now) for years and years. Recall that when it started, there were no subreddits, it was all one feed. The niche subreddits branched off of more general ones after participation grew and critical mass developed, the subreddit topics driven by what users were talking about.
It doesn’t work the other way around. You can create a community to house a topic that people want to talk about; you can’t make people interested in a topic just by creating a community. I think we’ve suffered by premature fissioning into a thousand niche communities, each with 1 or 2 people talking to themselves.
It’s definitely a volume thing. With niche interest, you’ll bump into this limitation quite frequently.
give those a scroll and see if anything works for you.
also search for topics you enjoy, or things you would expect to find as a subreddit. i usually sub to the top couple matches by population. this can backfire when i see the same post multiple times in (for example) 4 different linux coms. not everything wil have a com, but thats ok. make one if you feel strongly enough about it.
when i first joined a few years ago there was a tool that would try to find matches for your subreddits. i cant remember what it was called or if it still exists, but give it a look
a combo between the two is to find the list of your subs on reddit, then search them all one by one in lemmy. it takes time, but it will set you up reasonably well
pay attentiin when things are crossposted, maybe you would like one of those communities too
that and just stick with it. youll find your place.
edit: my links at the top broke
If you build it and interact with it, they will come (eventually). I think there’s a few crafts communities? I can’t remember. If not, create it, share with us your awesome creations!
I get that, it feels small and slow if you only follow the niche stuff. I hate insta but miss the creative and inspirational aspect. I mix in a little pinterest and pixelfed but it is still repetitive.
I guarantee there are sewing and maker/hobbyist communities.
Yeah those posts probably never see the light of day because someone downvotes them while sorting by new
Another problem solved by using subscribed instead of new
Maybe you should try that
I browse all but I have an extensive set of word filters that block stuff that I don’t want to see. I like seeing new communities come up and trying to make All work because of that. I did the same thing with Reddit like 20 years ago, though I switched to a subscribed feed there once they got big (before I left). This strategy works well for me.
Word filters is a great idea.
this place would be empty if I did that
Haha, yeah, pick your poison. Though we’re a diverse crowd. I really appreciate how there isn’t an endless stream of doomscrolling for me. My feed just ends at some point and reminds me to resume with other things 😅 (Also less noise, US politics and mainstream memes, which would be the real reason why I’d advise not to scroll All.)
What you’re missing is the algorithm.
You didn’t want to see that on Reddit, and it’s designed to steer away. Lemmy doesn’t decide what you see. You have to curate your own feed through a long process of blocking users and communities and using subscribe rather than a steady diet of all.
There’s also no curated algorithm to cause that dopamine rush, that causes the addiction, so you want to scroll and hit those juicy dopamine posts, but without the manipulation designed to keep you engaged and stuck, not going to happen. So it’s also a great place to detox from your brain being in the habit of seeking dopamine that way, it’s like a slow lowering to the ground, instead of cold turkey.
I was really feeling the loss of those dopamine hits, when I first transitioned over here, but now I don’t look for those hits here at all, and I can just enjoy a small scroll, without getting stuck in here, and put my phone down, which is nice.
What reddit and Facebook do, is hugely manipulative and created and curated to trap you there. I don’t know if that needs to be the same here, as much. And maybe curating your home page, really is the way to go.
I don’t like how people talk about The Algorithm™ as though any feed algorithm is inherently a problem and exists to keep people trapped in the app.
I’d love to have an algorithm automatically curated my feed so I don’t have to manually curate it, since the curation tools are so coarse.
PieFed categories of communities do this, with user-customizable and shareable Feeds. Perhaps check out PieFed.ca - it has the same set of admins that you have now, and even without an account you can view these and then subscribe to those communities in your Lemmy one, see full list at https://piefed.ca/topics.
I mean curation by community is too coarse. Often communities have a mixture of posts I’m interested in and posts that I’m not.
The idea of communities makes sense from a moderation perspective, but I don’t like it from a feed/search perspective.
What would be more ideal? The tighter focus that e.g. subreddits provided? More niche communities here keep dying off, so that we cannot have e.g. a community based on a single game, so much as a community like just “gaming”.
PieFed has a bunch of features that may help - post flairs (e.g. see posts about the Threadiverse but not Mastodon-style Fediverse posts), user flairs (e.g. see posts by senior “enthusiasts” in a community while excluding all those “hey all I am new and I love the Threadiverse so far”), or do direct keyword filtering. There are also user icons that you can place next to people’s account names to help you visually spot posts from people that you might want to either specifically read or perhaps avoid, but whom you did not want to simply block. You can also “follow” users too, receiving notifications whenever they post.
Also, since you can always find content in those categories of communities / Topic Feeds, you can fine-tune your actual subscriptions more so that you make it tighter in the general sense. i.e. I’m saying that you can both have your cake and eat it too! e.g. I unsubscribed from the most popular politics communities, which keeps it out of my Subscribed feed and allows other posts - even low-interaction stuff (with <10 upvotes) like poetry - to come through, but then whenever I want more I can always view those posts from a politics Feed, so nothing is “lost” that way.
PieFed offers a significantly more robust set of tools than Lemmy. Though in general the entire Threadiverse is niche, and cannot replace what Reddit had - like better post organization (across communities) is great and all, but when the actual content creators choose to submit to Reddit but not here, then there is only so much that can be done about that.
The Threadiverse isn’t like “dying” or anything, but it’s definitely not thriving either, when we used to have 65k active users while now we have 35k - people are leaving us in droves and not coming back.
Automatic personalized feed curation, imo, would make it better, based on tags added by the author, by the reader, and by automatic classification, which is then weighted against your previous interaction with posts with those tags and explicit user preferences regarding those tags.
In other words, an option for an automatic personalized feed algorithm. But people here (and the devs) are against it because it’s a boogeyman.That said piefed at least lets multiple tags be added to a post where Lemmy doesn’t, so that’s the minimum bar for something like what I’m describing.
But it’s a chicken and egg problem because the tags aren’t helpful for manual or automatic curation until more people actually use them accurately. So tldr I don’t have a solution.
It sounds like you might enjoy TikTok. Those Algorithms exist for a reason - they give people what they want. Sometimes they can be overzealous, like you watch just ONE video in YouTube and it starts showing you more like it… but overall people use those platforms because they enjoy what they offer to them.
And as you say, PieFed takes giant leaps towards offering a user power to find what they want, e.g. in providing hashtags, which of course so few people use since even if they submit a post to a community on PieFed that would support them, if you do that from a Lemmy account, or via a 3rd-party app that does not provide (easy) support for hashtags, then the post will have none.
The entire Threadiverse is an experiment. To see what people will build, and to see what the community overall will use. It’s sad to see it struggling so much but… writing code it turns out is so much easier than engendering consensus among people.
In the meantime, I now suggest to people that they not rely upon the Threadiverse and especially Lemmy as their sole source of social media. The tools are still being built, and even then something like 99% of what is already available is simply not being used, and the primary thing is Content - or you might argue rather interactions with people - both of which are fairly lacking here. e.g. so many major events happening irl that I don’t even hear about the tiniest bit about here, and many times I have even searched the Threadiverse for keywords after I’ve learned about the topic elsewhere in case it was here but I simply missed it, only to find that as far as the Threadiverse is concerned the topic simply does not exist. Our low number of content creators is simply insufficient to fully replace Reddit or other sources, unless one’s goal is simply masturbatory dopamine hits from exclusively looking at memes, or arguing about which facts exist or not (were there any fatalities in the Tiannamen Square Massacre or not?).
I do enjoy tiktok, although the longer it exists (and the longer it’s under American control) the more I feel the negative effects of “the algorithm” in that it’s not just building an echo chamber by accident but it’s intentionally showing me or not showing me things for their own gain.
I want an algorithm, but I don’t want an Algorithm ™
I hope piefed takes off because I like it. But still maybe it’s for the best that I use it as an excuse to disconnect completely from social media
What juicy dopamine posts are you talking about?
there are a handful of users who just post shitty low quality rage bait from shitty websites constantly across various communities all day long. many of these users were not on fedi a year ago.
like, websites you have never heard of, that are highly editorialized and frame things as dramatic and hyperbolic as possible.
and these posts dominate many of the news and politics communities, because juicy dopamine headlines mean people upvote.
and the comment sections are dumpster fires of similar minded folks, and anyone who is skeptical/critical gets dog piled and/or the OP comes out swinging calling them a fascist for daring to challenge the ‘trump does thing world is collapsing’ narrative they are all addicted to.
it’s all engagement/rage bait quality stuff. it’s not like, respectable moderate journalism that reports facts, that shit doesn’t get upvotes because the headlines are not juicy enough.
FWIW I have been on fedi for 3 years and this stuff is exploded the past 6-9 months, I used to like the news/politics subs a year ago because they were not dominated by this low quality content and typically had more respectable news-sources. but you can’t compete with low-brow rage bait trolls who are just here to collect as many upvotes and flood the zone with dramatic bullshit to drive engagement, and that’s what these posters are doing. if you confront them they just say you are a bad person who clearly supports Trump etc.
Somehow on the backend the wires must have got crossed and sent c/Lemmyshitpost content over to c/news instead 🤪
(/s …?)
Block users that seem extreme and it will clear up. Its like 10 people responsible for 95% of the posts.
yep.
and like 2-3 instances responsible for those 10 people. they have multiple accounts on various instances.
I did a couple things to make my life comfy here.
I changed my default sort to be “new comments” - this gave me the biggest perspective change on Lemmy, I now see where the active conversations are and it makes the place feel more full of people and less pages and pages of empty threads. I also found a lot less political stuff this way, because it gets posted a lot but people only interact with just a few of the political posts, so only those one end up floating to the top. I am finding myself getting less politics this way on Lemmy than I was on reddit. Also has the added bonus of highlighting where the active communities are.
I blocked Lemmy.ml and hexbear. A lot of the wilder leftist stuff comes from them and once it was blocked I saw the amount of politics in my feed drop right away.
“New Comments” is underrated! Active is pretty good too. For my default I use Subscribed+Scaled so I don’t miss anything, but if I’m looking for engagement I use New Comments or Active. The Hot sort kinda sucks on Lemmy lol, it’s too similar to New. But OP is on PieFed, IDK how Hot is there, it uses different math.
Subscribed+Scaled is my jam too. I’ve unsubscribed from a few of the news communities because I’ve seen the same post too many times but otherwise, all is pretty good here.
I’m surprised how many people use subscribed+scaled. I’ve been doing that as soon as the scaled feature was added.
Love sorting by “new comments” I believe old message boards where also sorted like that on default? or maybe im misremembering. Sadly PieFed does not have that yet :(
I dont like that posts from 24h ago are already forgotten and you never really get a broader perspective on things because I think people (me included) don’t bother commenting on stuff nobody will see as its not “Hot” anymore. I would love to see threads/posts being active for a longer time.
I also like piefeds “Active” algorithm. It does filter out alot of circle jerk content where there really is not much to talk about instead of agreeing.
idk why you needed to block hexbear, its not even federated with .world
I have accounts on several instances, so I just block all the same things for each.
In case they ever reverse it, they’re ahead of the curve 😎
I believe you’re somehow subsconciously expecting an algorithm to curate your feed.
On Lemmy that work is on you.
If you don’t curate your own feed, the feed curates you, and then someone, somewhere, is going to have to clean that mess up sometime.
“Every facet, every department of your mind, is to be programmed by you. And unless you assume your rightful responsibility, and begin to program your own mind, the world will program it for you." — Jack Kornfield
You curate the content you see on your own, doesn’t have to be political if you don’t want to.
I suggest to use https://lemmyverse.net/ to find communities you like and keep the feed to subscribed, so you see them and them only.
this way, Lemmy is actually good, no algorithm, I choose what to see and that’s a beautiful thing.
I have always felt surrounded by right wing bullshit, on previous socials and in life.
This is the only place where I look around, and believe that it is people further to the left of me that are maybe taking things a bit far. I do NOT, for the record, agree with the apologists who want us to let more fash in, I like being in a place where I am, for once, the moderate.
Yeah, no matter your political leanings, you gotta approach the fediverse in reverse of the way reddit worked. Reddit, you went and subbed to the things you were interested in and only went to the all feed if you wanted random discovert.
With lemmy, piefed and mbin (or kbin, whichever is still in use), you have to default to the all feed because there’s only so much activity per community, which means discovery is much harder and your subscribed feed takes months sometimes to get filled in with useful things. It’s more efficient and enjoyable to spend the time pruning out the non enjoyed stuff from the all feed so that you have access to more things overall.
That’s helped by app that have filters. You can weed out a lot of bullshit just with keywords preventing specific topics coming up even in communities you are in.
The fediverse is more work on the user’s part to make work. I don’t consider that a bad thing overall, but it does make it hard for ex redditors (aka r/effugees) to on board, and can be confusing for total newcomers to threaded forums.
Tbh though, ten plus years ago, the initial reddit experience for a noob there was worse in many ways. Hell, outright hostile at times, if you were a noob that dared speak your mind against the zeitgeist of a given sub. At least here, you usually only run into that if you’re not fairly solidly leftist, or try to hate on linux. That’s much easier to deal with imo.
Whatever happened to [email protected]? That was great for finding new communities which actually had active posters.
[email protected] does posts for community growth
https://sh.itjust.works/c/[email protected] has a bot. I always forget how to make it crosspost, sorry about that.
[email protected], but it doesn’t seem to have posted since April
I could have sworn that it just posted last week. Oh well.
They paused it in favor of other things like the new community one in .world (I think that’s where it is?).
That’s the one!
Oh man I forgot about that one. Sad it’s inactive.
I really miss the old wild west of reddit, but you’re totally right it was a much more insane and hostile place for anyone not conforming to the circlejerk. These kinds of smaller communities starting out are also not made for the kinda late adopters that may be wanting to come over and not even just lurk but doomscroll for hours. People will have the best experience if they find a dopamine hit in creating and sharing original content or they can handle lurking for a few minutes at a time and then going out and touching grass the rest of the day.
and mbin (or kbin, whichever is still in use)
It is Mbin that’s still alive, yeah. Despite some instances still being named kbin, like the one I’m on, they’re actually running Mbin.
Gotcha! I stay confused about it lol.
your subscribed feed takes months sometimes to get filled in with useful things
I’m regularly looking through Last 12 Hours with only my subscribe feed. You just have to take the time to find all of the communities you like. I got 92 communities in my list so far, though I think only 5-10% of them are the popular ones that show up all the time.
You can shape the All feed to your liking by blocking communities that regularly post stuff you don’t like. I did this with meme communities and rarely see any memes anymore. Sometimes it’s a whole instance that is full of communities you don’t want to see, then you might want to block it. Examples of those for me are ani.social for sexualized anime and fedinsfw.app for NSFW content.
Once you do this kind of trimming, the All feed becomes a lot less annoying.
I’m just blocking all political/news communities on sight. It’s helped a lot.
The participants do tend to escape, I suddenly found myself in a meme community full of North Korea apologists the other day. Anyone complaining about it was immediately removed.
Rules mean nothing unless they are actively enforced.
This is the (only) way, but it’s also like infinite whack-a-mole except slightly more irritating.
Especially when they label themselves like “memes” and “comics” etc.
Real. I have laughed harder at a funeral than 99% of all “political humor”. Did you know Trump is orange HAHEHEHAEHAEUAEAUEAUHEAUHEUUHEUHEEUHEUHEHUEHE.
Fwiw there is [email protected], though with at best one post per week (or almost per month lately), and on the instance that has decided to shadow-censor votes even from other users of the Threadiverse like Lemmy and Mbin without disclosure of that fact. Announcement of the latter might have had a really chilling effect upon the community since this past month the number of posts has really dropped off a cliff.
It’s been really hard for people to be the change they want to see in the world, and to share the same spaces despite such major differences in outlook on life. And for all the criticism of their moderation policies (note I am not questioning the validity of that, especially since I don’t post or typically even comment in the political communities so have no direct experience there), each time a MAJOR Threadiverse user leaves, they take all of their posting efforts with them - I’m talking about the likes of FlyingSquid, PugJesus, and I almost hesitate to mention AdmiralPatrick since I’ve already been accused of being an alt of his:-).
I tend to not post often myself unless I really have something I want to share, as people either can respond negatively or else not at all, even for like a nonpolitical comic, and that can make it somewhat un-fun. (So instead I try to make the Threadiverse more lively by contributing comments:-)
but does every other post have to be about some political shit on the all tab,
There’s a reason it’s called the “All” tab and not the “Some” tab, and even then it’s mostly making an effort.
The fediverse stuff is already set on the tooling for that. Set your feed view away from All to, say, Subscribed, and block the stuff you don’t like.
I’m forced into this box that is my subscribed feed or I have to actively search out new communities because all is just a political circle jerk that I don’t care about.
Come on, this is not a problem. It’s a feature. As another user said in another reply, having a algorithm curating your feed ends up curating you. It’s even easier here than on reddit since you can even block whole instances! Block the ones that have the most political communities and you will be fine.
I agree with you on one thing, the lack of content on topics that are not tech or political related. But that falls on us, the users. I hope more communities will continue to grow in the future.
Not to mention the moment I came back I saw a fucking flow chart on the instances drama of the week.
I don’t know, for me at least, it has been pretty funny, especially these days. You enter [email protected], see the big pinned thread that says “Don’t whine”, and then hundreds of people whining. It gives me a chuckle.
Yeah, I keep having to remind myself of that. Healthier tech is less convenient and not automatically tailored to our interests/desires by design. More convenience and automatic personalization means more psychological manipulation (at best, into spending more time on the platform so you will see more ads), as well as more data collection and less privacy.
There’s lots of content on the Threadiverse that I find pointless or dumb, but that’s why I only subscribe to communities that interest me… If I feel like punishing myself, I go to /all 😂😁😘
Yeah, the only way to enjoy lemmy is heavily, heavily curated. My community blocklist has over 300 entries these days …
To me that signals someone deeply in their bubble.
But sure, you have that option… Block me too, this comment is probably also too spicy. :)
I mean at least it is a curated bubble which is 100x better than one created by an algorithm.
there is no total and im to lazy to count but mine is quite a scroll to. Im in my bubble of no memes or sports or niche communities im not interested in.
some of us enjoy being a bubble of civil and sane folks, rather than extreme nutbags who fantasize about mass murder.
The somewhat recent Lindsey Graham death news was useful. The dude was an absolute scumbag, but everyone cheering his death and calling for the deaths of other politicians went right into the blocklist. I did some reading about it, and took the pulse of some younger people I know and it does seem that many (most?) Gen Z’s and younger Millennials generally feel that violence is the only solution to their perceived problems, with some even going as far as supporting retaliatory genocide in Israel. And that feeling of bloodthirsty revenge seemed prevalent. The notion of “two wrongs don’t make a right” is apparently old fashioned. Made me realize that my Xennial views are not very well aligned with the younger generations. Also makes me sad for the future, as I was hoping the foreign interventions and wars would eventually end and peace would prevail. Guess not.
What terrifies me, is yeah i see that in person all the time. Not just on the internet.
It’s revenge, and bitterness. I meet 30 year olds making like 200K a year who are steeped in bitterness they can’t afford a beach front mansion. A large part of it is pure entitlement and arrogance. Many young people think the world just owes them and they know better than everyone else and are completely delusional about how the world works. And often just spout meaningless cliche bullshit they know from social media rather than having any knowledge of history or any perspective with context.
And they encourage it in each other. I’ve seen so many awful groups at bars just dogging each other on the say the most heinous shit and openly declaring how they actively abuse and want to abuse and hurt other people. Then they basically think they are good people because they make posts on social media about how they support Trans people, and that justifies their thirst for blood or something. It’s insane. It’s like a collective psychosis.
And of course the irony is if you confronted them with the same violence that spouts out of their mouths, they will cry foul and play the victim. Because it’s OK for them to want to murder people, but they also see a cafe that doesn’t have oat milk as ‘abusing’ them.
Eternal September… except it’s fucking Groundhog Day now!!
