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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Sort by all and block as you go, I feel like that’s easier.
Tell me all about the political shit going on mate! I blocked them, keywords + communities. Lots of USA communities that never end but populate for no reason.
The world is actively imploding. You desperately want to put your head in the sand, but you’re bored down there, so you now want to pull your head out and have the rest of maintain your childish illusion while you ignore objective reality. Grow up and scroll beyond posts you don’t need
You’re also showing yourself as confidently ignorant as your angry, but also obviously aren’t filtering certain communities or keywords that your sensitive eyes can’t handle. Again, grow up.
That’s all you have are insults? Grow up.
or they just want to avoid people like you. because you, it’s insufferable to be lectured how you such by random strangers who just want to go on about catastrophe when most likely they are living a very cushy life, hence they need to be obsessed with politics in a wholly negative way, because that is the only major drama/tension in their life.
You just need a decent block/filter list. I scroll new/all and probably see 3-4 political posts daily.
I would be unable to use Lemmy/Piefed without a well-rounded block/filter list.
AI mods, what is going to happen in those subs, just AI generated posts? it wont help in training thier AI if its just those. or they going to try to force the human mods out?
Listen I have left leaning politics but does every other post have to be about some political shit on the all tab,
Just every other? You must’ve spent quite some time filtering shit already, then.
You see, if you don’t like all the ragebait you are No True Leftist. Disagree with anyone at any time? Gotta hand that card in, bro, 'cause you’ve got to be some fascist or something. Or “shitlib” or whatever cringe terminology the tankies use. This may come as a shock to you but at least Random Angry Dipshit was kind enough to inform you about your entire political stance that you thought was something radically different. Neat trick, right? Aren’t you grateful? I know I am.
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.
Correct! It’s also an unappealing and rather significant workload trying to find real activity on real communities on here to subscribe to, so /all is kinda it. Discoverability is garbage, one of many upshots of the way the federation gimmick was implemented.
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.
I’m sure they mostly do, if they ever even learn of this place at all. That’s why it keeps being like this. Parts of the fedv are indistinguishable from satire or outright trolling - that’s not counting explicitly blatant troll instances like ml, gr*d and hb. I’d seriously thought some of the leftist infighting meme was… y’know, a meme… Or that “here, I disagree with this one thing you said and now you’re banned from X communities”, from people who spent the last sentence whining about Reddit moderators. (They are right in isolation, just big blubbering hypocrites.)
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
Engagementbait on a platform that isn’t even pushing “the algorithm” that way. Nifty, right?
It’s not going to change, or even get any less of a pain to try to curate unless tooling gets better. It won’t, because the Lemmy devs at least are tankie idiots who have no interest in making anything easy to curate (because then, the very first thing to go is their main shitholes for being blatant assholes to everyone except dictators)
Edit: on that note, instance blocks on ml, gr*d and hb are an absolute must
Fwiw, PieFed has mostly solved the discoverability issue. Here’s a neat trick: make a new account on PieFed.social (note that PieFed.World won’t work, since they haven’t bothered to flesh out their categories of communities) and go through the sign-up wizard. Browse for a week, and every time you see a community that you like, subscribe to it also in your Lemmy account.
Make sure to also check out not only your Subscribed feed, but also the categories of communities too. It opens up a whole new method of browsing content. I get literal and actual poetry posts (despite ~10 upvotes + 0 comments) occasionally crossing my Subscribed feed this way, and if I feel in the mood it’s fairly easy (even for you now without an account login needed) to see it at https://piefed.social/topic/arts-craft.
Lemmy has nothing remotely like this, even though I like its UI.
Yeah, I get it, I wish more people used lemmy and that there is more apolitical stuff on here
However, neither are going to happen, without enormous efforts to buck the existing trends. See e.g. these recent comments from a community that was considering whether to switch from Reddit to the Threadiverse (https://www.reddit.com/r/fossdroid/comments/1uiywal/should_we_switch_to_lemmy/):
I tried switching to Lemmy a long time ago, but that place is toxic and full of weird people.
There are big pockets of radical tankie communities on Lemmy that like trolling and being toxic
There are a lot more reasons than this but having spent the last 3 years on the fediverse alternatives, and just seen the shit that happens over there, I feel very confident in saying it will not ever serve as a serious Reddit alternative. It will serve as something, but not Reddit
Lemmy is shit. So is reddit but Lemmy is shittier
Sadly, these seem representative of how people think of us here. You can see it for yourself too: simply browse most instances from an account without your existing blocks, in order to see what it is like from the eyes of a Redditor. Worse, they are primarily Christian centrists, and not only do they not FEEL welcomed here, but… in truth… they AREN’T ⁉️
There was a brief moment when Lemmy had ~65k active users, immediately during the Rexodus. That quickly fell to ~55k, which then fell to a more stable ~45k, and nowadays we are down to ~35k. And this is despite how Reddit is even in a process of killing off old-reddit, which is what we all said was going to be the signal for the end of Reddit and the great migration here. Tbf it is still early in that process, but it’s already started, it’s not some future date it’s happening now. And the people there say that there is no way in hell that they will come here. Maybe Bluesky, but not Lemmy.
Perhaps that’s fine - perhaps we are collectively okay with remaining niche, and most content (even some of the morenhighly technical stuff) staying on Reddit, but since your comment expressed the opposite desire, I thought I would try to point out that it is simply not going to happen - not unless there is a major change (bc otherwise simply doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result tends to not work out so well).
Perhaps the upcoming release of Lemmy v1.0, when moderator reports will finally begin federating out to other instances, can help create spaces that are more free of the types of behaviors that are currently causing people to avoid us here like the plague. I somewhat doubt it but… it’s possible? Lemmy will always remain tiny, so it is perhaps best that we make our peace with that. Sorry, it is what it is.
I respectfully disagree with your opinion. Maybe one day more people would lemmy, but you do have a point there
A lot problems are going to have to be addressed and one day more people will use lemmy,
Maybe one day people realize that not everyone on lemmy is a tankie and once that happens more people would use it
That’s the thing, many of these people self-report that they have tried. These are the ones who got over the hurdle of “it’s too complicated” and bravely dived right in. We here who use Linux btw aren’t afraid of such, but ofc to many people that is still daunting. But anyway, there are MANY who did come here… only to nope right back out, some of them retuning to Reddit.
And at least some of those - at least it definitely does not seem rare or even uncommon (it may even be fully common if not quite average) - remained here for years. They did not simply pop in for a day, not like what they saw, and popped right back out: they stuck with us, if not visiting daily then at least off and on for multiple years.
And then they abandoned the Threadiverse, going around trashing our reputation to anyone who will listen. And, given the several posts related to this topic just within the last week alone, not without good reasons. Even we who remain here (for however much longer) don’t like what we see.
Perhaps part of the problem is how we talk about it: I don’t care about discussions with “tankies” in relation to whatever political beliefs someone may have, I care about discussions with “trolls” and “incels” for whom no means push forward harder, who do not respect any boundaries and so turn people away from this platform, sometimes the moment they set foot here while other times in the longer term sense. We don’t so much have a “tankie problem” (that is in reference to a famous title of an old post here several years ago), we have a… what exactly? Though if we go down that route, it’s not a simple, single explanation but rather multiple - like trolls (hexbear) and doomerism posts and incels (meh, all social media has those though, it’s just that our overall lack of moderation tools allows them to thrive more here than elsewhere). The word “tankie” has come to symbolize all of those, in part bc it fits, if not extremely well then at least better than any other singular word?
But I want to stress that we do not merely have an image problem, so much as major structural ones. For the people coming here, having to choose between man vs. bear (our often unmoderated spaces that in many ways resemble 4chan, vs. the overly moderated fascist partners like Reddit and X that heavily limit what you are allowed to say), despite how we might think that their choice is “stupid”, even so they have chosen the bear… and the are strongly encouraging others to do the same (while in contrast I only see like <10 people on all of Reddit saying otherwise, that people should come here to check us out - and even there it’s often like Beehaw or mander.xyz while browsing locally, neither of which would act as a Reddit replacement for more than their specific subreddit, except the situation is even worse than that since those are both non-starters, on a large enough scale to migrate an entire subreddit here).
Yeah, this unfortunately. But I’m a bit cautiously optimistic about the fediverse. It’s not perfect, lemmy is not perfect, it has flaws yes, there are some bad people who use the fediverse yes, however in my opinion not enough people use lemmy and the fediverse
Oh the Threadiverse will definitely continue, and arguably it being smaller is even a good thing, helping to avoid attracting bot spam on the same level as corporate enshittified platforms. But I don’t think very many additional people will use it than this - in fact all prior trends since the Rexodus have shown quite a dramatic decrease instead - and therefore the topics covered, especially apolitical ones, are going to have to be “carried” by an ever-smaller and smaller subset of people who are willing to put in the work to add content. Which itself is daunting bc then whenever you post or comment you expose yourself to downvotes and toxic insane dumbshit replies, or more commonly merely silence in return.
People are only willing to put up with such for so long, before reaching for other alternatives (like going to a local library and reading a physical book?). And btw this is not unique to the Threadiverse with tankies, it’s an extremely prevalent effect across all Fediverse platforms - e.g. here is a very interesting article talking about the identical effect (maybe less on the side of outright trolling) on Mastodon as well: https://wingolog.org/archives/2024/09/24/fedi-is-for-losers. Fwiw I kinda like that terminology, except it can be so easily misunderstood: like we aren’t merely “losers” here as in opposition to “winners” as the article claims, but rather in opposition to “gainers” as in greedily trying to always grow, especially at any cost. Sometimes it’s okay to just sit there and be who you are, without trying to grow or expand further.
So no I don’t think that we will grow. But maybe that’s okay? Either way it is what it is - we can’t force people to come here against their will, only try to be as welcoming as possible so that they can feel at home here if they do decide to visit.
I have been recently struggling to not go back to reddit after 3 years on Lemmy…
Almost everything I read here just makes my mood worse and the people are getting worse and worse. I really hoped it would work as a reddit alternative but it’s exactly the opposite.
After the reddit migration there was a sense of optimism and feeling that this platform could be something great. People were joking and interacting positively.
Then the I/P happened and agenda posting went crazy you had people attacking people where both people were on the same side of the issue. Its gotten consistently worse since then. I/p, Ukraine, Trump, AI its making people miserable and rightfully so. But I wonder what is needed for the path back to optimism and positive discussion.
The answer is extraordinarily simple, notwithstanding the fact that people refuse to hear it. It is called the Intolerance Paradox.
By allowing bullying and other toxic behaviors, we condone them and even amplify them further. Hey look, come join the Threadiverse, we have pics of cats here! Never mind the fact that for every such picture there are twenty pics saying how Western civilization must fall, so that Russia, China, and North Korea may rise!!
Just learn to block people bro! And then also learn to block instances! Except don’t do that! Also, you literally can’t bc the software merely claims that you can, but actually haha you cannot really! Then learn to use keywords, never mind that the software does not let you do that either!!
If people go someplace and constantly get punched in the face then… I for one do not blame them when they stop going there? Which leads to less content, and making this space even more of an echo chamber than it already is.
Politics is kinda the default for lemmy.world, lemmy.hexbear, and lemmy.ml. If you don’t want politics, join an alternate server rather than .world. Or, alternatively, start curating your list of communities to block the comms channels that provide politics. That latter option is kinda what I did.
I really don’t see that many political posts in my subscribed feed and don’t see all that much on my Lemmy.world all feed either.
Most of my blocks have been just furry porn and the worst tankies on .ml
Lemmy.world is defederated from hexbear, Lemmygrad, and beehaw so maybe try blocking those instances if it’s too much for you
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
Notice what instances those posts come from and block them… Notice what users seem to post politics wherever. Block them…
I’ll often block lemmy.world, and unblock it when really bored.
Gotta curate your feed.
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 😂😁😘
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 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.)
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.
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…
There’s !grimdank@piefed.social
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.
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!
Be the change you want to see.
For now you could post to !Art_Alchemist_Guild@lemmy.today 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, @blaze@piefed.zip 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:
- !imadethis@lemmy.zip
- !sewing@lemmy.world
- !diy@beehaw.org
- !artshare@lemmy.world
- !crochet@lemmy.ca (as an example of a community that grew over time)
- !sewingrepairing@sh.itjust.works
- !dollhouse@lemmy.world
The list is pinned on !communitypromo@lemmy.ca !
That’s the one I forgot to check 🤦 I looked in !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca
Thanks!
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!
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
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.
!newcommunities@discuss.online
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
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.
I feel like I’m forced into this box that is my subscribed feed or I have to actively search out new communities
I don’t feel that this is a problem. I don’t ever use the All feed, because I specifically don’t want to see all. There’s a lot of garbage I don’t care about out there.
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”
This is… a weird change you’d want to see. Usually people want to see more signal and less noise.
At this point I think a lot of people, OP included, would tolerate plenty more noise as long as it isn’t “everything sucks and you should be mad about it!”
Yeah, signal is better than noise, but the signal itself becomes noise when it’s all so damn much doom and gloom and aggression and frustration and generally negative emotions. It’s not healthy to constantly drink from the fire hose of “this is everything wrong with everything”
And as an aside, I find that the quality of conversation around a lot of the political “signal” has been slipping too.
The breathing space between the constant fire hose of bad news is what I miss most from Reddit. Too many old (I assume) curmudgeons on Lemmy want this to be a 90’s Linux forum with a Politics discussion board and are hostile to any fun. So many times I’ve seen sentiment from users that anything mentioned should only be here if it’s going to lead to deep, informed, structured conversation. I always picture those people like Kyle’s dad from South Park sitting down at his PC in his office with a glass of red wine in hand (minus the vitriol that follows).
While there’s obviously space for those discussions here it’d be nice to have more purely fun memes and discussions. Ones not about an ongoing genocide, or state run police crack downs, or companies invading deeply personal private information. More often than not Lemmy is deeply depressing with no respite.
