• thebeardedpotato@lemmy.worldEnglish
      47·
      10 months ago

      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.

      • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
        50·
        10 months ago

        Viewing all? Yeah there’s your problem. Subscribe to things you want to see, and never even think about the rest.

        • Lfrith@lemmy.caEnglish
          18·
          10 months ago

          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.

          • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
            4·
            10 months ago

            Once in a while I skim the communities list. Other users make recommendations too.

      • mesamunefire@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        7·
        10 months ago

        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.

      • xthexder@l.sw0.comEnglish
        4·
        10 months ago

        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.

  • spikey@lemmy.worldEnglish
    69·
    10 months ago

    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. :)

      • spikey@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        10 months ago

        can you elaborate? or should I assume that means I can’t follow “communities” from privacy instances?

        • Vivian (she/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          7·
          10 months ago

          *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 :)

          • NOT_RICK@lemmy.worldEnglish
            6·
            10 months ago

            They only specifically block the piracy community on db0’s instance, to my knowledge. It’s definitely not a full instance ban anymore

  • Opinionhaver@feddit.ukEnglish
    66·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • aesthelete@lemmy.worldEnglish
      17·
      10 months ago

      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.

      • Opinionhaver@feddit.ukEnglish
        15·
        10 months ago

        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.

      • j4yt33@feddit.orgEnglish
        7·
        10 months ago

        Not wanting to be bombarded by a foreign country’s political antics and sociopathic leaders == sticking your head in the sand? Interesting take!

      • xye@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        10 months ago

        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.

    • TORFdot0@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      10 months ago

      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.

    • Korhaka@sopuli.xyzBannedEnglish
      7·
      10 months ago

      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.worldEnglish
      3·
      10 months ago

      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

      • Opinionhaver@feddit.ukEnglish
        2·
        10 months ago

        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.

        • mitchty@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
          2·
          10 months ago

          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.

      • NOT_RICK@lemmy.worldEnglish
        12·
        10 months ago

        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.

        • crowleysnow@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          10 months ago

          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

  • The Pantser@lemmy.worldEnglish
    26·
    10 months ago

    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.

  • azalty@jlai.luEnglish
    17·
    10 months ago

    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.

      • azalty@jlai.luEnglish
        3·
        10 months ago

        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.mlEnglish
          2·
          10 months ago

          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

      • azalty@jlai.luEnglish
        2·
        10 months ago

        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

    • azalty@jlai.luEnglish
      4·
      10 months ago

      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…

      • Hiro8811@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        10 months ago

        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.

        • azalty@jlai.luEnglish
          1·
          10 months ago

          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.

    • brendansimms@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      10 months ago

      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

  • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.mlEnglish
    13·
    10 months ago

    Open source, tunable locally running content discovery and search with crowd sourced share preference models (like, people who like x probably like y)

  • tiredofsametab@fedia.io
    3·
    10 months ago

    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).