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 work is also a major difference.
at least everyone sees the same thing when they click that button. tiktok will literally send you so far down a niche that you’ll try to talk to your friend about some huge trend you’ve been seeing for a week with millions of views and they’ll have never heard of it before because their feed was giving them an entirely different trend
thebeardedpotato@lemmy.world
on 08 Mar 20:19
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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.
It’s how I’ve kept my sanity for years using social media. Sticking to subscribed feed which is hobby/entertainment related stuff, and using aggressive filtering options if I decided to venture into all.
Same when it comes to youtube using newpipe and freetube so I stick to my feed and hiding stuff like trending videos, recommended videos, popular videos, and comments.
Turning a platform into being as minimalistic as possible has been my favorite method of consumption.
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.
If you’re on an instance with only 1 user, they’re the same thing. But yes, Lemmy’s a lot better if you just subscribe to what you want.
Flagstaff@programming.dev
on 09 Mar 07:01
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What? No, use “All” to browse through federated instances and then subscribe to any interesting communities across the whole Fediverse. Then stick to the “subscribed” feed and only occasionally recheck “All” if you’re bored and looking for new communities with none in particular; otherwise, run searches for them.
Let me explain how it works when you self host like me:
“All” starts out completely empty, there are no federated instances to find this way.
You then have to browse communities on other instances and subscribe to them on your own instance. Only then will posts start showing up in “All”.
Since there’s only 1 user, the list of communities in “All” is the exact same list of communities in “Subscribed”
For most people yes, you can just browse “All” unless you’re on a smaller instance, since someone on your Instance has probably already subscribed to the community you’re looking for.
Flagstaff@programming.dev
on 09 Mar 23:42
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Huh, I didn’t realize that All including all federated communities must be a Thunder-specific feature.
QualifiedKitten@discuss.online
on 09 Mar 07:02
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A bit of a random question: on a single user instance, if you subscribe to a community, then later unsubscribe from it, would that community still show up in your All feed?
I think it would show up in All still, but only posts that were synced while it was subscribed I think?. I haven’t really checked if posts would disappear again. On the “Top Day” view I use, the “All” posts are identical to “Subscribed”
ThePantser@lemmy.world
on 08 Mar 20:15
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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.
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 08 Mar 20:20
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I only browse by subscribed and I have half of Lemmy banned ngl I hate algorithmic feeds and corpo social media in general I don’t use it, I don’t see any ads online ever, and I’m often shocked by their quantity outside, I don’t know how others just do only algorithms like it’s nothing.
kevinsbacon@lemmy.today
on 08 Mar 20:37
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But I don’t want to think.
tiredofsametab@fedia.io
on 08 Mar 20:49
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I ready mbin by all > active (I take the approach of banning magazines I am not interested in rather than being in a subscribed bubble) and the few Japan-related (tax/legal/resident) subredits that haven't moved here yet by newest (only subscribed communities there of which I have like 5). I watch videos from my subscribed list until there's nothing left (rare) so rarely use any kind of algo feed. I watch twitch only for people I follow. I don't use any other social media for now (I did just start a business, so that will change somewhat since I need to advertise and get engagement).
surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
on 08 Mar 21:24
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I really enjoy being introduced to new things based on what other people like me enjoy.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world
on 08 Mar 21:39
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*raises hand*
Uh, this is a Lemmy’s sir
spikespiegelssidekick@lemmy.world
on 08 Mar 21:50
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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. :)
yessikg@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 08 Mar 21:54
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Welcome! Just FYI, lemmy.world blocks the piracy instance (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
spikespiegelssidekick@lemmy.world
on 08 Mar 22:19
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can you elaborate? or should I assume that means I can’t follow “communities” from privacy instances?
yessikg@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 09 Mar 01:43
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Yeah, just wanted to let you know since that instance is very active and has several big communities
AwakenedAce@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 09 Mar 01:45
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*piracy
Yes, that’s one of the restrictions. I also think you can’t see your users’ comments. (perhaps posts too, I am uncertain)
If you’re not interested in following something there or it’s not a topic you’re interested in, it’s alright. You could always create another account somewhere else or browse their instance anonymously.
The good thing about Lemmy is that you can always switch to another instance in the future. I started for a few months on .world and then moved to lemmy.blahaj.zone.
Welcome! I hope you have a great time here and I’m glad people are moving :)
It was such a weird argument to block it as well. The justification given was that they were concerned that they would be held legally responsible if users saw piracy content on their website.
It was such a bizarre argument. It seemed more like they had decided on personal grounds that they wanted to block it, and then tried to come up with some kind of external justification. It was the lack of intellectual honesty that pissed me off more than the fact that they’d done it.
spikespiegelssidekick@lemmy.world
on 09 Mar 07:28
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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?
rottingleaf@lemmy.world
on 09 Mar 07:52
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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.
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.
Opinionhaver@feddit.uk
on 09 Mar 06:48
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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.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world
on 09 Mar 07:23
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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.
auraithx@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 09 Mar 07:33
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Maybe stop sticking your head in the sand? 🤷
Opinionhaver@feddit.uk
on 09 Mar 08:39
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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.
clove@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 09 Mar 14:45
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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.
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.
Opinionhaver@feddit.uk
on 09 Mar 08:54
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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.
At least part of the problem for me is that the app I am using to access Lemmy isn’t really very good. I can block based on keywords in the title but not keywords in the post.
If I really wanted to I could probably find an app with better blocking abilities and try then to see if it’s possible to completely block out the US politics, but I’m not massively incentivized to do so. Not being American I don’t really get massively riled up about it, I get more upset about my own country’s politicians, which most Americans probably have never even heard of.
The greater problem is simply the fact that US content in general seems to get over emphasized in lieu of everything else. There’s a whole world of stuff going on out there and all we ever hear about is America. Even when the US has moderately sane leaders that is the case.
I really shouldn’t know who the congressman for Texas is, there’s no reason I should know that, yet I do. California catches fire, world news, massive flooding in Australia, barely mentioned.
I use Voyager and I’ve blocked a ton of communities, and keywords related to it. I like the blocking functions on there so far. I need to also subscribe to more communities so I can have a better Home feed.
People keep saying that and although he’s abhorrent and probably a threat to democracy in the US I don’t think he’s going to start a war. He lacks a convenient victim that he can use to justify a war, and honestly I don’t think he’s smart enough to come up with one.
Anyway a war wouldn’t achieve anything for him other than getting a target on his back.
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.
Might be time to start blocking some too, for my own sanity.
lepinkainen@lemmy.world
on 09 Mar 11:42
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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.
This is basically the same thing as what the big platforms do. You’re just offloading the decisions of what to see to a neural network and hope it’s deciding correctly. I’m not sure what a solution would be but I’m not sure I would put my eggs in the llm/ai basket. Not without a lot more details from the models on why they made a decision.
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.
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.
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.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
on 09 Mar 12:43
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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”.
IDKWhatUsernametoPutHereLolol@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 09 Mar 19:36
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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.
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.
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…
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.
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
on 10 Mar 14:56
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I want it all in a physical object in my home, that I can throw in the furnace any time. I don’t mind the extra milliseconds, I want it in my computer not someone else’s computer aka the cloud
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
Lucky_777@lemmy.world
on 10 Mar 15:02
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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
ThatOneSin@lemmy.world
on 10 Mar 13:42
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threaded - newest
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 work is also a major difference.
.
at least everyone sees the same thing when they click that button. tiktok will literally send you so far down a niche that you’ll try to talk to your friend about some huge trend you’ve been seeing for a week with millions of views and they’ll have never heard of it before because their feed was giving them an entirely different trend
NOOOO! (Angry yelling)
Lemmy users reading this:
<img alt="" src="https://i.giphy.com/9Q249Qsl5cfLi.gif">
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.
Viewing all? Yeah there’s your problem. Subscribe to things you want to see, and never even think about the rest.
@catloaf @thebeardedpotato I go one further and subscribe to feeds in mastodon (feel a bit like an impostor though 👀
It’s how I’ve kept my sanity for years using social media. Sticking to subscribed feed which is hobby/entertainment related stuff, and using aggressive filtering options if I decided to venture into all.
Same when it comes to youtube using newpipe and freetube so I stick to my feed and hiding stuff like trending videos, recommended videos, popular videos, and comments.
Turning a platform into being as minimalistic as possible has been my favorite method of consumption.
and how do you discover new things?
Once in a while I skim the communities list. Other users make recommendations too.
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.
.
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.
You could also use the Subscribed feed
If you’re on an instance with only 1 user, they’re the same thing. But yes, Lemmy’s a lot better if you just subscribe to what you want.
What? No, use “All” to browse through federated instances and then subscribe to any interesting communities across the whole Fediverse. Then stick to the “subscribed” feed and only occasionally recheck “All” if you’re bored and looking for new communities with none in particular; otherwise, run searches for them.
Let me explain how it works when you self host like me:
For most people yes, you can just browse “All” unless you’re on a smaller instance, since someone on your Instance has probably already subscribed to the community you’re looking for.
Huh, I didn’t realize that All including all federated communities must be a Thunder-specific feature.
A bit of a random question: on a single user instance, if you subscribe to a community, then later unsubscribe from it, would that community still show up in your All feed?
I think it would show up in All still, but only posts that were synced while it was subscribed I think?. I haven’t really checked if posts would disappear again. On the “Top Day” view I use, the “All” posts are identical to “Subscribed”
Just ban political communities
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.
I only browse by subscribed and I have half of Lemmy banned ngl I hate algorithmic feeds and corpo social media in general I don’t use it, I don’t see any ads online ever, and I’m often shocked by their quantity outside, I don’t know how others just do only algorithms like it’s nothing.
But I don’t want to think.
I ready mbin by all > active (I take the approach of banning magazines I am not interested in rather than being in a subscribed bubble) and the few Japan-related (tax/legal/resident) subredits that haven't moved here yet by newest (only subscribed communities there of which I have like 5). I watch videos from my subscribed list until there's nothing left (rare) so rarely use any kind of algo feed. I watch twitch only for people I follow. I don't use any other social media for now (I did just start a business, so that will change somewhat since I need to advertise and get engagement).
I really enjoy being introduced to new things based on what other people like me enjoy.
*raises hand*
Uh, this is a Lemmy’s sir
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)
can you elaborate? or should I assume that means I can’t follow “communities” from privacy instances?
Yeah, just wanted to let you know since that instance is very active and has several big communities
*piracy
Yes, that’s one of the restrictions. I also think you can’t see your users’ comments. (perhaps posts too, I am uncertain)
If you’re not interested in following something there or it’s not a topic you’re interested in, it’s alright. You could always create another account somewhere else or browse their instance anonymously.
The good thing about Lemmy is that you can always switch to another instance in the future. I started for a few months on .world and then moved to lemmy.blahaj.zone.
Welcome! I hope you have a great time here and I’m glad people are moving :)
They only specifically block the piracy community on db0’s instance, to my knowledge. It’s definitely not a full instance ban anymore
It was such a weird argument to block it as well. The justification given was that they were concerned that they would be held legally responsible if users saw piracy content on their website.
It was such a bizarre argument. It seemed more like they had decided on personal grounds that they wanted to block it, and then tried to come up with some kind of external justification. It was the lack of intellectual honesty that pissed me off more than the fact that they’d done it.
Ooooops, I didn’t realise @yessikg@lemmy.blahaj.zone meant _piracy_🏴☠️ it was late when I replied.😅
Anyway, thanks for letting me know!
He’ll, I still use rss. Newsify!
.
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:
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.
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 word 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To be privilege enough to take on that firehose…
Not wanting to be bombarded by a foreign country’s political antics and sociopathic leaders == sticking your head in the sand? Interesting take!
we’re all connected
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.
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.
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.
At least part of the problem for me is that the app I am using to access Lemmy isn’t really very good. I can block based on keywords in the title but not keywords in the post.
If I really wanted to I could probably find an app with better blocking abilities and try then to see if it’s possible to completely block out the US politics, but I’m not massively incentivized to do so. Not being American I don’t really get massively riled up about it, I get more upset about my own country’s politicians, which most Americans probably have never even heard of.
The greater problem is simply the fact that US content in general seems to get over emphasized in lieu of everything else. There’s a whole world of stuff going on out there and all we ever hear about is America. Even when the US has moderately sane leaders that is the case.
I really shouldn’t know who the congressman for Texas is, there’s no reason I should know that, yet I do. California catches fire, world news, massive flooding in Australia, barely mentioned.
I use Voyager and I’ve blocked a ton of communities, and keywords related to it. I like the blocking functions on there so far. I need to also subscribe to more communities so I can have a better Home feed.
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 or 1940s you’d be there like “I just can’t pick up the paper anymore without talk of this Hitler guy!”.
People keep saying that and although he’s abhorrent and probably a threat to democracy in the US I don’t think he’s going to start a war. He lacks a convenient victim that he can use to justify a war, and honestly I don’t think he’s smart enough to come up with one.
Anyway a war wouldn’t achieve anything for him other than getting a target on his back.
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.
Might be time to start blocking some too, for my own sanity.
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.
This is basically the same thing as what the big platforms do. You’re just offloading the decisions of what to see to a neural network and hope it’s deciding correctly. I’m not sure what a solution would be but I’m not sure I would put my eggs in the llm/ai basket. Not without a lot more details from the models on why they made a decision.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/1a6f42fe-c96b-4f35-b190-01b60a5f3d10.webp">
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.
Saw it in my feed btw
Open source, tunable locally running content discovery and search with crowd sourced share preference models (like, people who like x probably like y)
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.
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.
I’m sure they do, but I want them. It doesn’t have to be dumb content. It can make you discover and learn things while being addicting.
Somewhat yes but it also enables echo chambers
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.
I want it all in a physical object in my home, that I can throw in the furnace any time. I don’t mind the extra milliseconds, I want it in my computer not someone else’s computer aka the cloud
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
Sort by new is your answer here.
Shows uninteresting posts / trash posts containing a few words or so
And also mainly shows posts from bigger communities. Smaller communities tend to have much less posts per day/per month, so seeing one is really rare
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
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
I’m currently trying to figure out how to use RSS for this reason.