The relief when I open up Lemmy or Mastodon. It feels like coming home to an experience I didn’t realise I was missing. Lemmy has grown enough now that I can look at my feed throughout the day and there will be interesting posts, all with engaging comments and conversations. It’s like the internet I grew up on, only better: it’s ran by the people, for the people.
Obviously, that doesn’t mean the fedi isn’t plagued with issues. But it feels fundamentally more culturally healthy than whatever the fuck is going on in big corpo social media.
I hardly find any interesting posts. It’s mostly memes and tech news.
what kind of posts do you want to see? as with any new network effect system we have to do the posting to seed it
Fediverse seems like a step in the right direction, but how do I make my feed less depressing ;_;
how do I make my feed less depress
That’s the interesting part of the “old internet”, you curate your own feed.
Fediverse,Technology, and Privacy are chock full of all the news, and right now, there’s a lot of negative going around.
Start by noticing who’s posting in those forums and blocking the ones that are generally negative. We have a lot of bot posting that lays one way or the other. There’s a Monday morning US time bot that just floods with the most depressing stuff. If you can’t get it to sort out with that, start looking at other technology or news communities. Do the same thing there with blocking doom bots.
You can’t pull Artax out of the quicksand, but you can keep him from sinking so fast.
Post to communities that are less depressing and get more things going
I found this too initially. What I did was (and this may not work for you but it’s probably worth a whirl) only subscribe to easygoing / fun / quirky stuff for my “home” feed which I sort by “scaled” then bail into the top twelve hours of the “All” feed to keep up to date with what’s happening in the world.
A quieter, pleasant home feed is a good start to your day.
Problem I find is that the moment you sub to something popular it swamps everything else
That’s where the scaled thing comes in. It prioritises infrequently posted in communities which I like.
Unsubscribe from technology that alones changes your feed by a lot
I struggle with this too.
At the moment I have a huge list of filtered keywords to exclude certain topics or words likely to appear in extreme content. It does cut out a lot of content that I don’t want to see, but doesn’t help with general negativity and doesn’t work with image posts.
I’m thinking of setting up my own filtering system with sentiment analysis, OCR and image classification so I can make my feed more balanced.
Do you have a gun and some conviction?
Fedi is where it is at!
The last remaining bastion of Web 1.0. The forums that had held out got absorbed by Reddit. Its fall seemed to crush all that was left.
What the Fediverse is building is over infrastructure that can last. It’s the first chance at something permanent.
there are still some traditional forums around, relevant, and pretty much the de-facto global community hub, e.g. boardgamegeek.com
To those interested, there’s !Forums@sh.itjust.works too =)
Its cozy. I feel we are still becoming a monoculture, but one built around one very specific type of nerdy person.
I’d say it’s closer to forming clusters instead. Sure some groups may seem more hegemonic for being more incisive, but I can notice some splits in vision.
I like it here. Got permabanned from reddit formoffering general safety advice to protestors in Minnesota in early 2025.
Starting an account with Lemmy has been The closest I’ve come to the glory days of Orange-Red vs Periwinkle, and knowing exactly when the narwhal bacons.
I suspect this site will remain largely unknown for a while, among people that don’t like reading words. I’ll stay a while.
Got permabanned from reddit formoffering general safety advice to protestors in Minnesota in early 2025.
Fucking fascist racist piece of shit spez. May his guards be the first ones to defective during the apocalypse.
I wonder what this “general safety advice” was that got you banned…
Hell yeah!
Reddit is supposedly worth $17 billion, and yet this place feels more alive by an order of magnitude to me so what does that say about the value of this place?
Not just in magnetude, but it feels more evenly spread out too. Even communities/subforums that by other standards would be absolutely silent, if you post something, you may still get a reaction, like a comment, a thumbs up, a boost or crosspost, etc.
Honestly yeah. I do have a Reddit account, but I get way more responses and quality interactions here than I do over there anymore. Every comment over there is just someone trying to make a joke these days.
Priceless
Groupthink here does sometimes hit reddit narwhal beckons levels sometimes, still much better than the modern internet elsewhere
Some cases of group think, even mob mentality at times, are a culture of the instance/instances of those involved. So if the user spots something in that line, blocking either the instance, or at least the users if instance blocking isn’t available, can do wonders.
you and me both! The existence of fediverse has been doing wonders to my mental health.
Lemmy: the Methadone of Reddit addiction!
This is exactly how I feel. A step in the right direction, where one day casting my phone into the sea is seemingly unattainable perfection
i’m gonna post this on mastodon and give you credit lol
Link.
I miss Usenet. This is as close as there is.
Don’t people still use Usenet?
It used to be something every ISP gave you access to. Now it’s all but gone. Google Groups sort of absorbed it, and then killed it.
I never heard of it untill recently, some say it is still around.
To be honest I never really understood what it is.
It was essentially a text-based, decentralized Lemmy/Reddit prior to the web. Different groups you could belong to, with various discussions.
It was more like email threads, in my opinion.
Fediverse is great. Funnily though I’ll point out it hasn’t “survived” per se during the internet, it’s more so a new in the past few years right, which proves to me great things and the right idea can still be conceived and created no matter if the current environment is shit - we can always say no and build something better.
Nah. It’s a cesspool like 4chan, except for far left.
Except the far left doesn’t systematically stoke violence and hatespeech/hateful ideologies like 4chan/the rightwing.
If it makes fash like you uncomfortable then we’re doing something right here.
The only issue is how difficult it is to onboard. If you don’t spend time building a list of subscribed communities/people, your feed will be very stale.
I’d love to see something like Bluesky’s starter packs. One button to follow a bunch of people/communities.
Isn’t it the exact same with Reddit?
No. Reddit’s onboarding is quite good, because they have curated lists of subreddits they’ll push on new users. For obvious reason, Lemmy shouldn’t have an “official” list.
PieFed pretty much does that
Yep, Piefed does that and a bunch more.
I think people could simulate something with Mastodon’s import/export feature too, though then the user would need to accept files from strangers, and I think we all know where that ends.
Preach.
it’s alright. there were a few BBS’s I swore I’d never stop connecting to. a few usenet groups… a few email lists… a few web rings, a few bloggers… a few social media sites … etc. etc etc etc
What is BBS? (Gen Z, I’m sorry)
old timey forums from the 80s and 90s.
bulletin board system
Bulletin Board System. They were online platforms that were local to your city, you connected directly to them through the phone wires. The Internet existed, but the world wide web format had not yet come into being to make it interesting for the majority of people, and it was more expensive, still the abode of academics, military, and a small community of hobbyists.
BBSs were forum-like, accommodated the sharing of small files, and filled with creative and technical people from your area. They peaked in the early nineties.
