Where are the creators? The cosplayers? The rube goldberg machines made out of post it's and shot glasses? The "I draw pictures by playing notes on a piano" people? The people porting Doom to a yoga mat? The "I made a car out of thrown out Crocs" people? The "I built a treadmill for my friend's overweight insects" people?
This is the stupidest shit I could think of but people are out there making and doing weirder/amazing-er things... Where are those people in Lemmy? I browse All and it's just politics, linux, and shit posts.
I have two accounts. One with nothing blocked, and this one were I blocked all the serious subs, news subs, depressing subs, etc. so that I could switch to it when things got overwhelming.
Ended up being so much happier with the filtered feed I almost never flip back. I'm still aware of current happenings from other sources and Lemmy is my chill out spot and I love it.
I recommend going in heavy with the community and user blocking. Manually curating your feed is the only way to make social media even barely tolerable. You'll feel some FOMO at first thinking that by blocking you're going to miss something. Yes you are but you also wont know what you're missing so it doesn't matter. Personally I have set several content filters aswell so threads about Elon, Twitter, Reddit, Trump, Taylor Swift etc. get automatically hidden.
On top of this I have around 500 blocked users and about the same amount of instances (mostly porn and foreign ones) I sometimes see a thread with more replies than what I'm seeing or that a blocked user has commented on my message. When I log out to see what it is, my conclusion virtually every time is that "yep, you're staying blocked"
We do need to address certain toxic traits that are bringing things down, hyper negativity is the default as well as intense partisanship to the point where anyone with a slightly unpopular opinion is instantly labeled as an troll, bot, or agent of dark forces - you can see it a dozen times just in this thread.
There is no debate here because anyone who doesn't follow the groupthink is chased out, the news is super biased because of this but it also spills over in to everywhere.
I think there are too many people that think they should be the dictator of lemmy, we really need to start up voting good posts and useful content rather than knee-jerk down voting.
Yes! I'm also very tired of the repetitive "capitalism bad. America bad. XYZ terrible for the environment" replies. We get it, you have things you don't like. You don't need to repeat it on literally every single subject that exists. There are so many low-effort comments that just recycle the same 3 subjects over and over again, regardless of the actual original topic.
Yes. This place is relentlessly negative, and I'm no sunny optimist myself.
I aggressively block communities and on some occasions, people who are obvious agenda pushers. It takes a mildly annoying amount of work to clear away the mess and keep it cleared, but it can be done. It's okay to block shit.
Agree. The amount of people doom saying, massively blowing things out of proportion, or having victim complexes is out of control. If you got all your news from Lemmy, you'd think society as we know it is about to collapse.. or at least American society.
Reddit has a lot of downfalls, but at least it was diverse and the memes were better.
Lemmy, and .ml in particular is absolutely infested with right wing trolls hiding behind the thinnest veneer of leftism who are trying to doom post over the economy and geopolitics hoping young voters will check out and not vote.
It's literally the exact same playbook from 2016, and it's amazing more people don't see it.
I find I miss a lot of current events, only browsing Lemmy. It seems Lazer-focused on whatever it's currently worrying about, ignoring more timely news.
What makes me irritated is when I go to any kinda uplifting news places it's usually low key abelism or sexism or somethings people don't understand can harm people which is weird
The bubble has burst, none of the fun communities I subbed to when I came over have any active users left anymore. It's all the same 3-4 people posting news and rhetoric.
I think Reddit is much worse at the moment. Don't go there unless you want to worsen your situation.
Sometimes it's required to step away from reading news for a while. Now that there's US elections, the world is going to focus on that, creating all sorts of doom news. Also you can build your frontpage yourself, simply unsubscribe from the doom Lemmy's and only read the positive ones.
You should probably just block some of the news comms. Often you can find news elsewhere anyway so it's not the most pressing or interesting thing to follow tbh.
Not just you at all. I read the Top 6-Hour usually, so I have been blocking communities and filtering out keywords left and right to try and reduce the constant deluge of doom. (Yes it is working)
It's like, yeah I know we are totally hosed, I don't need reminders every 10 milliseconds. All it leads to is learned helplessness and depression.
Absolutely. I second the heavy use of blocking communities using an app. If you still want exposure to news you can consider downloading a couple news apps and checking them once or twice a day. You will still see the shittier aspects of humanity but at least you can do it when you choose to.
Always plenty to be gloomy about, I tend to block those communities though, not because I'm in denial about it, I already know to vote Green or Democratic for like my whole life, you don't need to convince or sway me.
Omg YES. I am so tired of seeing bad news all the time, all it does is ruin your day. I come to Lemmy to unwind and escape reality, to look at some funny memes and forget my life for a bit, not to be constantly reminded of all the horrible things happening in the world.
Yes, me too. I've unsubscribed from the political and news communities, several weeks ago. That helps. And I don't think it's specifically a Lemmy problem. It's everywhere. And since lots of people use Lemmy as a news feed, we get all the doom posts in our timelines.
Unsub from news and politics first and foremost. If something important happens, you'll hear about it. Just make sure you keep some open channel (IRL!) to keep an ear in.
Then start focusing on communities where people recognize each other's names. You can either be big, or you can be intimate. Trying to approach tiny Lemmy like it's big anonymous Reddit is going to be disappointing. You're missing an opportunity if you're not engaging with familiar names.
The beauty of kbin/lemmy is how easy it is to block content you don't want to see, so either block the users who mostly post doom, or the news/politics communities as a whole. If you then still want to scroll news for a limited time, browse in incognito or from a secondary account ¯\(ツ)/¯
Fear and anger sell, which is why so much news media is focused on things that make people angry and afraid. Same with politicians. This place isn't inherently trying to push anything (not the way the media does), but it certainly reflects the stuff that people are talking about.
Yes. I have taken to blocking communities because my energy and mood is a precious resource I need to protect. I know already the world is in a bad place.
Nah, I kinda like it, keeps my mornings sufficiently spicy and grounded. I tend to be more upbeat when I get too in my shit, and so it's mostly better if I can browse around horrible doomposts and depressing shit when I need it. Certainly, I tend to like it better than cheerful nonsense that tends to either amount to played out references, or tribalistic bashing, though, that's not to say doomposts can't really be in that same vein either.
In any case, you're gonna see them because they're more likely to survive and get attention. This is good, for bringing awareness, maybe bad for explanatory power or sustained activism, but it strictly has more survival power in the attention economy, when compared to normal posts.
I'm tired of the "DAE" posts that got banned in reddit, and I understand why. There's usually a better way to express this opinion.
To entertain this though, this is an internet wise concept, we're aware of "doomscrolling" for a reason. There's not really a reason to think Lemmy or some other platform would be wildly different.
No because I'm already stuck in my own delusio bubble that makes me not care. Couldn't tell you whether it's my personality, autism, or a combination of things.
I think it's just marketing and propaganda. The companies, corporations and political forces that want to drive the world wide internet conversations are spilling over and leaking into everything including Lemmy.
Lemmy.News has a whole group that is constantly pushing war rhetoric against Russia ... lots of other groups are either right leaning or drifting to far right sentiments.
It's the same thing that is happening in the real world. Everyone has an opinion and if we were all honest and showed it, the world overall is a fairly liberal, open and accepting civilization.
Unfortunately, the loudest voices are those with the most extreme views and more often than not, they have a lot of money and funding behind them because wealthy people are pushing an agenda.
It's not that the world has become worse, is that the worst of us have become the loudest voices while the majority of us choose not to say anything.