5d ago

Is there a way to have a less depressing Lemmy experience?

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?

97 comments

In your Lemmy account settings, set your default feed to 'subscribed' instead of 'all'.
When you open the app or log in on your browser you will only see communities you've subscribed to.
It will greatly improve your (and everyone else's) experience if you subscribe to positive communties and participate in them.

Step 1: don't browse the All feed. I dunno how Reddit was okay for you, visiting r/all was always full of Trump this Trump that every 5 minutes.
- At least Reddit had a nice feature where you could filter out up to 100 communities from r/all. I could still get a varied experience while not having to look at things like politics, sportsball, or games I didn't care for.

Aside from suggested communities, make sure to filter out content by keywords.
You can do that on many mobile apps, while in the web version it is commonly done through uBlock Origin functionality.
After that, Lemmy gets quite nice

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%2Fjournal.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:
!goodnews@kbin.social
!lemmybewholesome@lemmy.world
!goodnewseveryone@sh.itjust.works
!upliftingnews@lemmy.world
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/
- !goodnews@kbin.social
  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

Same as reddit: Subscribe to communities you like then only look at those.
- Yes and no, since lemmy has a smaller user base certain type of content will have a much higher presence than reddit. And when 5 instances are all posting from the same source, that will saturate the platform.
  If every new user immediately gets turned off by it, because curating your homepage is like step 2, then lemmy will continue struggling with retaining new users.
  
  Lemmy doesn't really have enough users for the same type of mindless only scrolling in communities you like from what I've seen. On reddit I'm subscribed to 2 drama subs Gentoo sub and a few others. There is enough content in that for me to just scroll that instead of all.
  on the other hand here I find my subscriptions literally don't get new posts. It's fine I'm getting used to it but it means I'm using the all equivalent far more often.

Block Lemmy.ml, hexbear, and dbzer0, then make your own list of keywords to block (Trump, Elon, murder, angry, etc etc)
- Yep, my block list is long. It’s updated occasionally. I call it “weeding the digital garden”. Negatively sprouts everywhere and it’s imperative to cull it asap.
  The way I see it there’s far too many things in the digital world to care about, so I just care about basically none of them. I’d rather spend energy loving the people I love than being angry at what I see on the internet.
  The internet is full of slacktivism and I find it’s more worthwhile to do something good rather than critiquing the bad and doing nothing.
- You can block keywords? I just see communities, users, and instances in my block settings.
  
  Some of the apps add this as a feature client side. For example I know sync has this. Not aware of it on the web site though.

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
- !newcommunities@lemmy.world
- 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.
- besides !newcommunities@lemmy.world there's also !communitypromo@lemmy.ca and !trendingcommunities@feddit.nl
  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".

Block news subs.
- Mind you, news subs are depressing right now for a reason.

I use Sync and it lets me block keywords like Trump,Elon,Musk. It doesn't catch everything but does a good amount.

Add a filter for anything political that comes to mind, subscribe to fun instances (history memes, anime, shitposting)

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
  
  Isn't it the whole idea? ;)
  
  It should make less depressing content emerge
  
  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.

Does anyone else feel this way about their Lemmy experience?
Yes. I usually stick to fandom communities where I post some cool fanart and chat about latest books I have read. I avoid all feed at all cost.
I hoped that !hopeposting@lemmy.world would be the same as r/hopeposting@reddit.com but the comments are night and day in there. I still repost stuff but a drive to make OC memes is just not there.
I usually hang out in !anime@ani.social, !lightnovels@ani.social and !hermitcraft@lemmy.world
P.S. Also my polish instance szmer.info doesn't have as bad ALL feed as the lemmy.world due to people that don't care about US politics and not subscribing to those communities.

You have to block A LOT of communities. In fact, blocking communities is more important than subscribing to them!
Also: https://lemmy.today/post/22524765
Also: Voyager (or other apps) with filters for keywords.
- In fact, blocking communities is more important than subscribing to them!
  I browse Subscribed. Whitelisting communities is almost certainly going to be a lot more aggressive than browsing All and blacklisting communities.
  
  True actually. Browsing Subscribed is better than All. Although, you have to venture out into All to find new communities to subscribe to.
  I also found switching between Hot and Active sorts mixes things up.
- Agreed. I block several communities a day.
  
  Same. I try to always block at least 3 new sports team channels before breakfast, so that the sport ball updates don't completely overwhelm my brief trips into all.
  I love that this is a great place for local sports, but it's not my thing.

I'm trying to move my news off social media and on to RSS. I set up an RSS reader with a handful of trusted and varied news sources (some mainstream, some independent, some local, some foreign) and now I'm starting to filter out news from Lemmy and other social networks.
Some things I quickly noticed is that not having a comments section is actually great, I can jump straight to or past subjects I'm not in the mood for, and there's no endless scroll but if I feel there's too little I can add more sources and if there's too much I can take some out. I still also use Lemmy so if I find an interesting new blog or website, I can add it to my RSS reader to keep following it instead of relying on strangers posting new content and it getting voted up. This lets me focus more on the smaller special interest groups that social media is actually good for.

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
- 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'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.

The issue is that mods here seem to not care if their communities turn into doomer shitposts. It's quite baffling.
Every single community, no matter how unrelated they are to politics, are now just spammed with political bullshit. I'm actually on the cusp on uninstalling my Lemmy app.

I use voyager and block words phrases and instances that bring that stuff up. And sometimes users who repeatedly do it too.
I'm also on Lemmy blahaj which don't know if that matters. But over time I rarely have a lot of depressing political things in my feed anymore. Just every so often.
I have another account on Lemmy world for political things already I rarely use it.
- I'm also on Lemmy blahaj which don't know if that matters
  It does. If your home instance blocks other instances then you'll never see their posts, regardless of your settings.
  I don't believe there's a native way to see these blocks in Lemmy, you'd have to look at a third party site that tracks that sort of thing.
  
  If your instance blocks other instances, they are listed on the "blocked" tab of the Instances page (the link is in the footer).
  E.g. for lemmy.world https://lemmy.world/instances
  Remember that spam instances are a thing, and are often what is being blocked by admins.

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: !newcommunities@lemmy.world is good place to see what's new, also there is !communitypromo@lemmy.ca
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.

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

I think places like Lemmy are better suited for discussions and ofc ongoing events and politics are a huge part of that.
Have you tried 9gag and other more "lightweight" and meme oriented platforms?
- This seems really pedantic. Recommending 9gag because someone does not want to see constant bad news is just a but out there.

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.

Use an alternative front-end like Tesseract to filter out specific words on desktop. For mobile, you can use e.g. Voyager or Interstellar to filter out specific words. Unfollow news and politics communities.
- That sounds like a lot of filter words. Thanks for the suggestion though!
  
  Most of political posts are about the US so with only a few keywords you can filter out 80% of the shit news (mine are Trump, Musk, Democrat, Republican).
  Then you add some if you want (Israel ? Palestine ? Russia ? Or some of your country specific themes)
  The only problem is that if the words are on an image and not title it won’t be filtered. But you can fine tune your blacklist with time by blocking url, users, communities and instances.
  That + mostly browsing by subscribed made my lemmy the perfect happy bubble.
  
  I've found that there's a few common themes to the posts that pop up... not that many. I have like 10-15 at most.

Come and join us on !casualuk@feddit.uk. We provide bottom quality banter there.
Edit to add:
Also, sub to: !cooking_with_fire@feddit.uk, !dadjokes@lemmy.world, !stick@sh.itjust.works, and !youcantparktheremate@feddit.uk. Anytime lemmy is getting you down, just peruse any of these for some politics-free, stress-free content.

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.

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.

20 active communities which are not politics, news, memes or tech
https://lemmyverse.link/feddit.org/post/6554534
!newcommunities@lemmy.world
- For anyone on dbzer0, or who already have link redirection set up: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/35001146

I mainly browse through home page subscriptions. Occasionally I venture to all to find new subs, but I have a lot of subs blocked and keywords blocked for when I do.

!wizards@lemmy.world
- !superbowl@lemmy.world

If you're into crosswords and word games, there are !crossword@lemmy.world, !nytconnections@lemmy.world, !dailygames@lemmy.zip

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

Yeah, I had to step away from Lemmy for a while because I was feeling too doomer these days. I need to go sub to more comms I like and use the filter on my app, but I just haven’t yet. For now, I’ve switched to Loops to get my serotonin hit.

I asked a similar question about solutions to this. There is a tags feature coming that I'm really excited for that will really help. This will allow more robust filtering and customisation of your feed.
https://szmer.info/comment/8317617

On mastodon, I used word filters when my feed would be poisoned. Here on Lemmy these do not exist, I believe?
Otherwise I could e.g. block words like Trump and Musk, and only allow them in certain communities. That would make the experience possibly more nice.
- I had to move from the mobile web page to an app to get key word filtering.
- I read there's an extension or something for word filters or you can use an app.

I filter out a bunch of words too...but it doesn't work when people have generic titles. Half the meme communities are nothing but political slop despite (some of) their rules saying otherwise.
If Lemmy implemented tags like red had, then we can start flagging stuff so people can filter it.

You can block alot of political content pretty easily through an inbuilt function

I use filters in boost app to exclude posts with words, websites that I don't want to see.

Some days I just go and block all political and general news communities I see. I usually unblock a few some days later.

Pornography is never bad news. Normalize more pornography in your life

Yes, gtfo out of Lemmy. It's Twitter but for leftists.

This is why Lemmy will never become popular with the mainstream untill these people get their shit together. No sane person wants to browse a feed like mine despite the great lenghts I go attempting to block all politics and rage bait. I can only imagine how bad it is for someone just following the most popular communities and expecting a feed similar to that of Reddit.
If you don't want to leave then I think the second best option is to keep calling out these users poisoning the platform. Just be aware that there is going to be a lot hate coming your way then. This place is filled to the brim with extremists.

97 comments