Submitted 1 month ago by mesamunefire@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://usher.dev/posts/2025-03-08-kill-your-feeds/
I was so fed up with IG and explored mastodon/pixelfed for a bit, and it felt like a lot of weight off my shoulder when looking at the feed(s) knowing that there is no machinery feeding me straightup BS. The “feed” was behaving exactly as it used to during the days when RSS was a thing (remember those?).
like… wow… I have control over this! and I don’t have to spend too much energy filtering off BS. That convinced to explore alternatives like Lemmy.
I joined today. :)
Welcome! Just FYI, lemmy.world blocks the piracy instance (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
He’ll, I still use rss. Newsify!
Lemmy doesn’t have a recommendation algorithm, yet our feeds are just as bad - if not worse. If your daily interest revolves around reading about U.S. politics, this might not be obvious to you, but for the rest of us, it’s painfully clear. And before you suggest “just avoid political communities” or “stick to your subscription feed,” let me assure you that doesn’t work. It’s not just political communities - it’s everywhere. I can’t even read articles about space without people injecting their opinions on the CEO of a certain rocket company. Even communities like microblogmemes are beyond salvation. If you limit yourself exclusively to communities where the “no politics” rule is actually enforced, you’ll exhaust new content within about two minutes each day.
My point is that the algorithm itself isn’t the sole issue. Algorithms can actually be helpful, provided you invest even minimal effort into training them. YouTube doesn’t bombard me with politics because it knows I’m not interested. Lemmy’s user base, however, seems so addicted to outrage that outrage inevitably dominates everyone’s experience here. If we measure the quality of social media by counting the “regrettable minutes” we’ve spent there, Lemmy would rank at the absolute bottom. Even Twitter doesn’t irritate me as consistently as Lemmy does. I’ve gone to great lengths setting up content filters to block politics, but even when half my feed is blocked, the majority of what’s left is still U.S. politics.
If you limit yourself exclusively to communities where the “no politics” rule is actually enforced, you’ll exhaust new content within about two minutes each day.
It’s almost like US politics are a historic fucking shit show and that affects many other things.
Doesn’t mean I want to spend all day everyday reading about it. I have other interests.
I have blocked any mention of trump and musk, and yet I still know every single stupid thing they do. It’s impossible to avoid it.
It’s almost like…one is the leader of the richest country in the world and the other is running a government office that’s dismantling the government.
Seriously, if you guys were alive in the 1930s you’d be there like “I just can’t pick up the paper anymore without talk of this Hitler guy!”.
That’s the thing - consuming anything even remotely resembling a healthy news diet requires actively avoiding most of it. Unfiltered news consumption means getting firehosed with information to the point of paralysis and depression. I wouldn’t be surprised if even a hermit living in the woods knows the latest about Trump and Musk. There’s no way to avoid hearing about them and who ever suggests you can clearly haven’t even tried.
Maybe stop sticking your head in the sand? 🤷
Not everyone wants to spend their entire day reading about the politics of a country they don’t even live in. Have you considered that some people prefer getting their news once a day from a proper news outlet, and then spending the rest of their day focused on topics they’re actually interested in? That’s not “sticking your head in the sand,” it’s having healthy boundaries.
Not wanting to be bombarded by a foreign country’s political antics and sociopathic leaders == sticking your head in the sand? Interesting take!
Exactly. Maybe if you’re seeing it everywhere that’s because the issue is so pervasive it affects that much of the lives of those using it. So either do something about it or go to spaces where people don’t have problems I guess.
To be privilege enough to take on that firehose…
This isn’t my experience at all, maybe I just have curated my subscriptions enough that I don’t see that much. Or maybe it’s just because I’m so used to just tuning out socialist/communist comments on threads that have nothing to do with politics.
It’s also worth noting that Lenny’s algorithms sort by either top (which is just votes), hot (which is based on votes and comments which will surface contentious topics like politics more often), new (which is just when it was posted), and scaled (which is just hot but proportional to the size of the community so it will surface smaller communities more often).
If you sort by hot it’s going to give you a similar feed to Reddit. I prefer to sort by top by 6/12/24hr and by scaled personally.
Lemmy is better if you avoid all at least. On local I usually get stuff about Europe a lot more. But subscribed is dwarfed by technology a it’s the largest community. Subscribed + scaled list seems to be a fairly good list though.
I was just thinking about this yesterday. These days, Lemmy is just making me depressed. I like to read comments to get further insight to articles, maybe someone trying to point out the author’s bias, or a joke. But Lemmy comments are all some variation of “the world is doomed”, “kill this person”, or “capitalism is the root of all woe”. They are neither useful, insightful, or improve my day in any way. Lemmy is making my life less enjoyable. It was already an overall negative and cynical space during the Biden administration; now it is unbearable.
I’ve been on Lemmy for a long time now, since Reddit killed 3rd party clients with their API change, but now I think I might go back to Reddit. The company itself has a lot of problems, but at least I can get a lot of non-doom content to fill my day.
To be fair, I don’t think Lemmy is to blame for all the negativity. It’s impossible to escape politics nowadays thanks to American dominance in social media. And since the US is a dumpster fire since 2016, the rest of the world gets to be a dumpster fire as well.
In my opinion, Lemmy is the least negative social media platform out there and that’s saying something. I advise against going back to Reddit. I take peeks at it every once in a while and oh boy did things go downhill since I deleted my Reddit account after the API changes.
The best way to deal with all of this is to limit your exposure to social media all together.
Lemmy’s user base, however, seems so addicted to outrage that outrage inevitably dominates everyone’s experience here.
Ye-es, people look for outrage. Especially people who left mainstream platforms because of outrage. We don’t have gladiator fights today, so the wish for murder should be vented out differently somehow.
I’ve gone to great lengths setting up content filters to block politics, but even when half my feed is blocked, the majority of what’s left is still U.S. politics.
Right, and wouldn’t it be much more convenient to block posts and users and whole communities by regex and logical rules?
Say, post title contains anything “federal” and “government” like - kill. Post content contains something about voting - kill. More than one third of comments involves political jargon - kill. The resulting kill score is measured against threshold.
But of course that would make communities and instances and moderators as they exist now much less useful. That would transition us back to Usenet in some sense. People don’t want to give up that kind of power, even unconsciously they’ll resist. When they are a community mod and everything about its climate depends on them, it’s different in prestige from them just cleaning up obvious abuse, and the climate depending on individual kill rules set up on clients.
I want a local LLM filtering my feed(s). So I really don’t need to see Elmo and Donald -related stuff.
Simple word filters don’t work, but with a LLM I might be able to make it work
Agree. Blocking / keyword based filtering is quite blunt tool. I’d much rather tell AI what I don’t want to see and have it analyze the content for me.
Yes! Full agree
Continues scrolling lemmy
Agreed, I was mostly joking, but there are still algorithms that drive the hot and controversial sorting. The fact that you can look up how those algorithms works is also a major difference.
NOOOO! (Angry yelling)
Idk man, the universe is an algorithm.
Everything I did, am doing, and will do, are all part of the algorithm. I have no control. Free will is a lie. Even the act of me typing this comment, is not of my free will. The neurons are making me do it. AH FUCK STOOOOP IT YE FUCKING NEURONS, BAD NEURONS…
Everything is fine, I have free will, disregard everything above, that’s the other half of the brain in this body that’s being weird.
THERE IS NO FREE WILL
AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH
You did not choose Lemmy. Lemmy chose you! Accept your fate. Accept Determinism.
Reddit is clearly the Bad Place.
Life is the bad place.
Good use of this image lol. But wait till you see the time knife.
I brows Lemmy by all and then I filter out the communities I don’t want to see. This lets me see the new communities that pop up and decided if I want to sub to them. I have around 300 blocked.
Yeah sometimes there is some overzealous people making some quite strange communities by the handfull at one go though, but yeah, blocking everything you don’t like is the way to go IMO too.
Saw it in my feed btw
Has Lemmy ever noticed how much the Anglophone web speaks like advertisers now?
I’m off to Youtube now to watch some content. Gotta get that new content! Thanks to modern networking technologies I’ll never run out of content! Does the non-English web do the same? Are the French and Russians and Chinese similarly indoctrinated?
Let’s rewrite some Wikipedia entry intros to see our adopted term work its wonders:
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni[a] (6 March 1475 – 18 February 1564), known mononymously as Michelangelo,[b][1] was an Italian content creator of the High Renaissance.`
Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) was an English content creator who wrote content under the pen name of George Orwell.[2][3]
Michael Joseph Jackson (August 29, 1958 – June 25, 2009) was an American content creator. Dubbed the “King of Content”, he is regarded as one of the most significant figures of the 20th century. Over a four-decade career, his content broke racial barriers in America and made him a global figure. Through content, he proliferated visual performance for artists in popular music; popularizing content including the moonwalk (which he named), the robot, and the anti-gravity lean. Jackson is often deemed the greatest content creator of all time based on his content and subscribers.[1]
After watching Content on Youtube I’ll probably visit the zoo to marvel at the meat. Then later I might load Pornhub and watch some meat. By then it’ll be time for some dinner, so the butcher will fix me up with some meat.
This language demeans all creative endeavour. It trashes our ability to communicate. When read out loud it’s infantilising too.
You missed a few terms… how about “influencer handle” instead of “pen name,” for example?
The Russian web is full of that.
This language demeans all creative endeavour. It trashes our ability to communicate. When read out loud it’s infantilising too.
Yes. It makes it appear as if everything real didn’t have any meaning and were just some similar mass, like wine or garum.
While the important people and processes are the middlemen controlling the routes. Or like with USSR, where the real was subject to the administrative and the political.
Since history rhymes, I love how Denmark got absolutely thrashed by Hanseatic cities when it became too dependent on its role as a controller of a big route.
What’s wrong with the word “content”? What would would you use to describe the things shared in places like Lemmy?
It subordinates all creative output to the priorities of advertising. On Lemmy (in fact any web forum) I’m a member and a discussion participant. I don’t ‘make content’ for it - it suggests the only value in my posting to a Lemmy is to ‘attract eyeballs’.
The ability to dress and chisel marble and have your creations still talked about half a millennia later, and being the most recognizable singer on the planet, aren’t fungible.
Technology Connections put out a video recently about this, it’s quite entertaining: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJpZjg8GuA
OMG, I was just going to say the same thing!
Nice to see another fan in the wild! :D
No algorithm makes social networks so annoying. Lemmy is so much annoying because of this. I always see the same stuff, aka US news and some shitposts, the usual upvoted and trending stuff
There’s no discovery algorithm and no way to see posts from smaller subscribed communities easily. Each sorting method returns non-interesting posts.
We need open source, local running, use tunable, auditable, collectively shareable content discovery algorithm
All for it, except maybe for it to run locally. An instance running it will be faster as it already has all posts and comments stored.
Sort by new is your answer here.
Shows uninteresting posts / trash posts containing a few words or so
People say algorithms hook you and make you dependent: they show you the stuff you want, so you stay for longer. If I didn’t want to see stuff I want, I wouldn’t go to Lemmy…
They really do. Most of these algorithms have been developed by the same people that work at casinos algorithms. Lemmy is a forum like, social media.
Through the Voyager phone app I sometimes use the ‘random community’ search option to make Lemmy like StumbleUpon. I dont see this random option through desktop though…maybe its a Voyager thing
Weird, I have my subscribed feeds from which I always see posts but I regularly see new stuff from subs I am not subscribed to and regularly it’s something interesting
Open source, tunable locally running content discovery and search with crowd sourced share preference models (like, people who like x probably like y)
*raises hand*
Uh, this is a Lemmy’s sir
I really enjoy being introduced to new things based on what other people like me enjoy.
I only browse by subscribed and I have half of Lemmy banned ngl I hate algorithmic feeds
I’m currently trying to figure out how to use RSS for this reason.
Or you can aggressively tailor them. I still use FB because I enjoy several industry and hobby groups there. With a few FF plugins and proactively closing any ads, FB is completely usable and enjoyable.
Any social media you can’t control like this is definitely problematic, but I haven’t explored too many other platforms to see if they can be tailored. I did abandon Threads because it’s a right wing toxic troll hellhole with a shitty design, so some can’t be “fixed”.
But I don’t want to think.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
Lemmy users reading this:
Image
thebeardedpotato@lemmy.world 1 month ago
LOL
I was actually thinking about my experience with Lemmy as I was reading this article, particularly how the scrolling is made to generate rage. I don’t filter my feed and just view “all”, but I don’t think I’ve once walked away from Lemmy not in a bad mood.
Now that may be observation bias or something, or a function of how I don’t tailor my own experience, but regardless, Lemmy leaves me angrier when I leave then when I open the app. I’m trying to cut back and eventually quit.
catloaf@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Viewing all? Yeah there’s your problem. Subscribe to things you want to see, and never even think about the rest.
mesamunefire@lemmy.world 1 month ago
You can also set filters in some clients. And other micro feed like software (piefed) can put filters for your user.
Or browse by new. Seems to work for me.
xthexder@l.sw0.com 1 month ago
Setting up my own instance ended up being pretty good for me since it meant I had to manually subscribe to every community I want. The quality of “All” posts depends heavily on the instance you’re on.
Feathercrown@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Just ban political communities