I like programming.dev and what's happening on my "local" instance, but once i check of what's happening in the wild (other instances) I am reluctant to recommend lemmy to others.

Just don't switch to "all", that's it. Pretty much any platform that has more than 1.5 users and allows any political discussions is doomed to be filled with extreme politics

I think that "all" of anything is going to be a dumpster fire no matter what your standards are. Sturgeon said that 90% of everything is crud. What he didn't say was that everyone has their own opinion on which 10% is worth anything.

Or you could put on your hip waders and follow Kipling into the waters looking for the 20% that makes it worthwhile to wade through the other 80%.

(More at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law, including a link to the actual text of what Kipling said.)

Right now, if you can't handle having to block communities you don't like, then ALL isn't the place for you.

Lemmyverse.net is a great directory to find content.

Anti-capitalism was already a big thing on Reddit but being so pro Russia/ China seems to be a Lemmy thing. I wouldn't call the latter left but rather morons.

What communities/instances are you dominating your /c/all? Asking because I was hoping for more leftist discussion and I'm not really seeing it outside of lemmygrad.

Edit: I'm mostly following programming.dev and lemmyrs.org, so I'm not really looking too hard. And I appreciate beehaw, but it feels more center left than left.

I’ve blocked a few communities here and there. Not a bad way to control what content you’ll see personally.

I hit All occasionally to see if there’s a community that catches my eye, it’s rare but it does happen so I’ll subscribe.

I also block the ones I have absolutely zero interest in ever seeing again. It’s simple to do.

It's not Lemmy it's mostly lemmy.ml and lemmygrad, two of the biggest instances. As both name's imply both are communist in nature but both host communities for multiple topics since they where the most active instances. The Lemmy Devs originally created Lemmy due to Reddit banning/quarantining multiple leftist subreddits around 2018/2019 and created lemmy.ml as the first instance. Don't know the history behind lemmygrad but it's a communist instance nonetheless.

You might find it easier to recommend your friends an instance that federates closer in line with your views. You can view who is federated and defederated by a particular instance at https://Your_Instance_URL/instances

With boost on reddit I would just block any subreddits that I felt was just noise. Any American centered subreddits (mostly politics), NSFW subreddits (back when those showed up in r/all), niche meme stuff like that deep fried stuff, etc... You could also block keywords like "elon" and "trump". It actually made r/all a decent experience to browse through.

If it isn't already a feature on lemmy, hopefully it will soon. I much prefer letting the user do the filtering than the nuclear option that is defederating. Boost for lemmy is also on the way so I expect that to be an option once the app launches.

I'm using the Connect app on Android, it has the option to block users, communities and instances....

Go through the community explorer, subscribe to those you like, use "subscribed" feed.

Is your instance not blocking lemmy.ml? Seems to be the smart thing to do nowadays.