The situation got so bad that actual news overtook memes in top posts on Lemmy
Im becoming unsettled. Maybe a few memes total on first two pages. How could things go so bad? Where are the yester beans gone?
Beans? Look here youngin
I haven't seen any egg pics. Something is wrong, I can feel it.
🥚
Bullying someone who's country is at war with a dictator is bad, yes.
....what situation? When?
If you want to do something do something. Others have shown how easy actually is if you are really willing to.
If not, saturating everyone head with bad news is not healthy for anyone.
News should always take a higher seat than memes. I don’t know why this is considered abnormal. For ages, the front page of ALL newspapers paper have been news. Not the comics section.
Do you need a guide on how to block the shitposting community?
This place ain't the newspapers
It’s not a comedy forum either.
Lemmy is a link aggregator. News are linked. Memes are directly uploaded.
Reddit used to be mostly news.
Feels like it's been that way since the election to be honest
Lemmy has always been a political outlet, but post election has been out of hands.
I mean, it makes sense. We're witnessing the US becoming a fascist dictatorship in realtime. It's a huge upset to the way the world has been for everyone living's lifetimes.
I blocked all of the news and political communities on my main account.
I keep an alt to keep track of local and national news of where I live. Improved my mental health substantially.
Edit: I live in Europe
I wish I could, but personally not knowing would be a greater mental load then having to process this run away train of fascism.
We should really stay on top of the news to know when Trump wants us to wear identifying armbands
Blaze lives inside the sopuli.xyz server farm confirmed.
Initially I did as well - but we are fast approaching a point where simply ignoring this further will be unacceptable.
I feel that sometime soon we may be called to do more than be a voice of reason. Americans are being tested right now. Will you quietly look away because you fear discomfort as your freedoms are stripped away? As your neighbors are assailed?
I'm not fond of the sting of teargas and pepper spray... but it's probably about time to develop a taste for it again. Find a group, know your community, and stop hiding.
Oh, and if you see a Nazi? Punch it.
All threats. Foreign and domestic.
You can't pretend it isn't happening.
I'd love to be able to tune it out, but that's what they want.
Ignorance is compliance.
I find that keyword-based filtering seems to work better than blocking. We're at a point here that if one is blocking all communities where people post news and politics to then there's nothing left to browse because you'd need to block virtually every even slightly popular community.
My current record so far is refreshing the front page and seeing 4 posts with all the others being filtered out. That's how bad the politics and news spam has gotten. And people wonder why normies aren't coming here..
i don't wonder that. let the normies have their Destiny 2 and PublicFreakout and fantasy sports communities elsewhere. seeing comment section after section on Reddit filled to the brim with "I'm so funny!" unserious one liners was obnoxious. people talking about GoThrones fandom and RC cars while inequality skyrockets or the rich dismantle every federal govt program that benefit 99% of the population is not a good thing to yearn for. the founders-effect dominance from a handful of narrow ideologically centrists is not something we need more of.
I combine it with blocking users. Political communities are blocked entirely, and then users who post irrelevant political crap in non-political communities are blocked individually.
Just the one alt?
Can you do me a favor and reply with your alts?
I've blocked at least 3 so far but it's like playing fucking whack a mole
I have to admit I find some of this user's takes annoying, while also finding some useful nuggets. I'm trying to learn to ignore inane or otherwise not useful to healing, while trying to respond to more thoughtful content.
Trump is using a technique called 'The Gish Gallop.'
Obama wanted to pass the ACA and the GOP managed to block it for almost two years because Obama kept talking about that one thing.
Trump is breaking rules left and right; plus screaming about crazy ideas like buying Greenland.
There is so much stuff going on that normal minds just want to shut down to get some peace and quiet.
Obama increased mass surveillance and US undercover operations significantly. Bush ultimately started it but Obama has a opportunity to stand on the side of freedom but didn't take it. Like all recent presidents he was focused on extending the power of the executive branch. The real answer is checks and balances.
It's because political discussion (and in general most commentary) on Reddit / Meta / Xitter has become overtly censored, and there's a real concern that it's tracked - a bad thing in an authoritarian regime barreling towards facism. Those who wish to have real political discourse having been moving away, and lemmy is receiving a lot of that traffic.
As an example, referring to a list of CEO's on Reddit as "Luigi's List" will get you a ban warning for inciting violence.
This increase in sensitivity to the potential implications of real political speech, coupled with increasingly stringent rules on the parts of the mods and accelerated by the auto-mod bots and AI chat bots, has led to a very restrictive discussion environment on the big social media networks. Even Bluesky, which is left-leaning and possesses the architecture for multiple servers to avoid centralization, is following this pattern.
Lemmy / Mastodon are attractive because they're not as restrictive, when you're posting you're interacting with real people, and because the mods and admins are humans dealing with a manageable population. And if someone censors you on the server you're on, you just move to another. More and more folks are realizing this as the enshitification of the big 3 continues.
Fear not, the memes will live on, but I think that in a very real way, Lemmy's (and the Fediverse's) time is upon us, and this is the result. People are using it for real shit because the real shit is upon us, and we need a place where we can freely discuss how to get clear of the incoming shitstorm.
Posting a kill list seems pretty questionable to me. I get how there can be some dark humor in that but I can totally see how that's calling for violence.
The issue is the rich are committing organized violence against all of us every day, but just theorizing on how we can organize and retaliate is a crime.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives, and the rich understand that too.
coming from a guy who said this up stream:
What annoys me is when people gibe attention to people who have either done questionable things or don't deserve to be publicized.
I guess some what of a bootlicker... then
Real political discourse is too heavily censored in corporate spaces
What annoys me is when people gibe attention to people who have either done questionable things or don't deserve to be publicized.
Bad press is often better than no press. When you start putting the light on a CEO you are often turning them into a celebrity. Better to not focus on specific people unless they have done serious wrong on there own.
Just remember, this is the worst things have been so far. The Trump admin still has shovels in hand, it can get much, much, worse.
Yes I always think of that Simpsons line, this is the worse day so far. It doesn't help any anxiety about the geopolitical situation even backdropped by an amusing sitcom. I do hope people learn better, but maybe we'll see the way of nuking ourselves and wonder what happened while still being intolerant (as a whole, I know many individuals are cool but those are never in position of power it seems).
I limit my political stories these days after Trump's first term I can't handle the same input, not American but that doesn't matter to the world's outcome.
OP is onto something.
maybe people are getting sad out there. maybe news is coming at us fast.. because change (unprecedented bad bad change) is happening faster than ever before?
it's a sign of the times. people blaming news junkies or whining about blocking comms don't get it. we're no longer living in a time when we can afford to ignore what's happening around us.
ps, I'm not arguing against memes. in fact go check !conservative@lemmy.world it's been turned into a satire comm under new mods and it's wonderful!
Can’t ignore it.
Can’t change it.
Only heartburn.
Don't ever think you can't change it.
Audrey Hepburn was a teenager when the Nazis invaded.
She could only dance, but that's what she did.
There's always a way to fight.
I think we can change it. We just have to say, "Mountain, be thou removed" and get busy with our shovels to help remove it. It won't be easy, but it is doable.
Yeah that's unfortunate. I joined that community to listen to concerns of my compatriots.
What happened?
People pay attention to memes more than news...
I blocked all the stupid meme communities as soon as I started using Lemmy, glad to see actual discussion is replacing brain rot tho.
It's a good thing.
God forbid we have any space without the constant never ending same arguments right?
You can.
You can subscribe to every stupid brain rot meme sub you want, and when you're ready to turn your brain off just switch to only viewing subscribed communities.
No one is saying not to do that, burnout is real and what fascists hope for.
So by all means, take your breaks. Check out and don't think about it for a day or two. But come back and care about the important shit again.
But when viewing /all and seeing the top post be actual discussions on serious topics it's a good thing.
It means right now more people are choosing that over the brain rot. Hopefully it becomes the norm, but we still need to rotate off for a break, it's not gonna be a short fight against fascism. No one is going to make it to the end without some breaks.
Trump and Elon took office. Now all I see is Trump posts.
political memes often are news though. they aren't like, mutually exclusive.
In a very broad sense that it tells you something happened on this topic.
memes themselves are propaganda and effective one at that since the most regarded of us can consume it easily and spread it like COVID.
Sure i like me some shit memes from libs and cringe at the right's memes but that literally waste of time IMHO
Memes are effective tool to gauge what the regime is jerking and who shilling what angle.
Good example of "conservative" Zelensky memes today. Literally if you don't watch the interaction you won't know how it went down and memes paint an "interesting" picture. People who see the video will make up their own minds and even if you hate Ukraine, seeing that would only be enjoyable if you are sheltered nepo baby or "alpha" male.
That shit was bad optics for US and that's bad business.
It's not just Lemmy either. Every platform is looking like this. At least people have woken the fuck up.
some truth here, reddit deff has the sentiment slip through despite the ban hammer
(But yeah, things will never quite go back to the way they were, nor would we want them to exactly.)
i was just thinking this.. it used to be 80% memes and now its just the downfall of western society. depressing.
American Dream: The Boogaloo
I actually saw some news bleed into shitpost the other day. It's that bad.
That's like half of my MO lol
Memes is the reason why i rarely sort by top.