Despite not subscribing to political communities and having a large number of content filters based on keywords, my feed here is still for a large part all negative articles and ragebait. Elon Musk this and Israel that. Microsoft ruining windows, AI ruining internet, right wingers and capitalism ruining the world, police being racist and shooting innocent people, companies demanding workers into offices, privacy being under constant attack from all sides… And all this despite the effort I go thru to block that from my view. I can only imagine what the unfiltered feed is like.
I get that this is all important stuff but holy shit it’s depressing when that’s all I read here every day. Sure, some of it is legitimately news worthy but lets be real here; much of it isn’t. It’s just to get you riled up and engaging with the post. It’s the exact same thing all major social media recommendation algorithms are doing; feeding you content that causes outrage to keep you on the platform for as long as possible. Do we really need to know about every stupid thing Elon says or every police shooting where the victim is black?
It’s no wonder so many people, especially younger ones feel absolutely miserable from day to day. It can’t be healthy to live like this. I feel like this kind of media diet is pretty much equivalent to eating fast food every single day.
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Agree. Lemmy seems to have like… Some sort of progressive LGBTQ friendly black pill folks or something. Completely resigned to doom posting, always negative. Always looking to kneecap. Always bringing up macro scale issues on micro scale events. Calling for violence, saying society is guaranteed toast.
Same here. I don’t know if I could in good conscience go back to Reddit, but the constant doomposting makes Lemmy seem more and more unattractive by the day - and that’s after applying a hefty amount of post filters.
I keep telling myself that if I just stick it out, we’ll eventually get enough users to drown out the negativity, but some days I wonder if we’ll ever get there when that’s like 95% of the feed.
I think you are doing something wrong if you still see this things.
Bonus points if you create the account on a wholesome instance so you can browse local too.
I’m not necessarily looking for “wholesome” content, though. I’m looking for interesting content.
Also, there isn’t enough content to browse just a few subs, and there are a lot of communities being created that i would miss out on, and “opt-out” is generally my preferred way to browse.
At the risk of burying my reply I was about to post at the top level ….
Is it just me that this is a technical problem? Is it just iOS? I get logged out multiple times per session, such that one of the reasons I browse all is so I don’t need to login yet again until I want to post something. (And I use an older iPad with a fingerprint reader that is neither fast nor reliable). Of course the other reason is lack of content, but I’m trying to do my part there. But laziness is a big deal.
For those people recommending finding a project: can I recommend “with a side goal of bringing a Lemmy Community to life”? I recently adopted a new community for a new hobby of mine. I found it existing but empty, so can only speculate it was created during Rexxit. I’ve been trying to post twice a week to see if I can draw people in, and it has gotten up to double digit subscribers, but definitely a work in progress. Anyhow, now my focal point in Lemmy is to eagerly check whether anyone posted, and to see if there is a response I can take to encourage more. All the doom and gloom takes a bit of a back seat
I think one of Lemmy’s issues is that everyone wants to create a community instead of contributing to what’s here. People expect to have all the “niche hobby” communities like Reddit had right off the bat, but we don’t have the mass of people to support that - especially when you can have multiple communities for one topic across instances. Everything dilutes to nothing.
So we end up with nearly a 1:1 user/community ratio and every community either gets abandoned or only has 1 power-user posting.
I think the solution is essentially what you’re doing - to take existing communities and breathe life into them. Start out small and focused, and then branch out when it feels necessary.
Can we not create the communities we wish to see on Lemmy ourselves? I know it might not be full of people at first, but if it at least exists, people who want to interact about said topic in said community can find it eventually and do so, and it can grow over time. Or is this not how it works? Is my logic flawed in any way?
There is not enough activity to sustain niche communities.
Is there nothing that can be done about it? Maybe have some sort of community to find smaller communities. Maybe people just don’t know (and maybe don’t look for or find) there’s a community they might like
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Is the audience for it not here or does the audience not find smaller communities? I for one just browse whatever loads up on Jerboa, and created an account mainly to have some control over what I see (i.e., blocking stuff I’m not interested in). I don’t know that I’d find smaller communities if they don’t get more popular or popular communities get less active to the point of these smaller communities showing up. I don’t know that I can search for anything but communities (on Jerboa, at least). Is there even a search for general, idk, posts and stuff? Not denying maybe the audience isn’t here. Just think maybe finding smaller communities isn’t as easy (or maybe it’s just me, idk. I’m not even looking for specific communities, tbh. Lemmy is my “eh, I’m not doing nothing right now. Imma just check this app on my phone”)
Honestly reddit has gotten less negativity because a lot of it moved here. I still use reddit I use both reddit and lemmy.
Got back from a lemmy break recently because I couldn’t stand the negativity and needed a while away from it
I find this to be an interesting take.
I feel like Reddit had significantly more negativity if you compare now to the 2016 election cycle.
There is a major difference, though… Reddit also had stronger niche communities (at the time). Those communities are largely marginalized now, but I guess they are likely still larger than here.
So you’d see the political stuff, but then you’d see your favorite game got an update. Those distractions are admittedly less numerous here.
This said, the astro-turfing on Reddit was insane. Way, way worse than anything I’ve seen here. The worse thing we have here is Lemmy.ml. They are far worse than astro-turfers, since they just straight up delete comments and ban people that dissent from their propaganda.
But if you block them, or join an insurance that has defederated them, then you’re alright. Fair warning, my instance has not done this… yet.
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I’ve checked it out again recently. It has gone way downhill. Once vibrant communities are now full of themed variations of Ask Reddit questions. The posts are such obvious trivialities created for nothing more than to drive meaningless engagement.
I just want to say, thank you for still being here and trying to change it in a good direction.