Why is my entire feed in this Lemmy server nothing but American politics and Reddit bashing

Lemmy does not have an engagement based algorithm. It does not over analyze your every move to keep you on the site. This means you will have to do content curation yourself.

First of all, the block button exists, use liberally.

Second, the subscribe button exists, so use it to curate a nice subscribed feed

Third, I do believe there are third party clients (lemmy apps made by others) that have a word filter feature which allow you to automatically hide post and comments which contain certain keywords. (I think Voyager has that. Download mobile app here. Use the site version of the app here. Keep in mind that it uses lemm.ee as its default instance.)

But yeah, content curration is kinda just left up to you. Subscribe, Block. That's it.

Alternatively, you could join a "themed instance", that is, an instance made to house a particular community or interest, like that star-trek instance, but Lemmy does not have enough users for those to be able to exist.

If you want creative stuff, might want to have a look at [email protected]? Sorry, I don't have much for you.

Check your subs.

The key is that you need to subscribe to the type of content you want to see. There's no company here deciding what your feed is going to be.

@[email protected], what kind of stuff are you interested in? I'm happy to help you find related communities :)

Did you try subscribing to your interests?

I noticed that too. I’m American but don’t give a shit about politics because it’s just too upsetting.

Go to the communities posting about it and click the 3 dots in the upper right hand corner and block the sub. I had to do this over the course of about 2 days while subbing to ones I enjoyed.

Still learning how to navigate this site and find communities I enjoy, but for the most part I’m not seeing the politics anymore. Hope this helps at least a little

Average dotworld experience.

I have two feeds: one is "subscribed" for all the stuff I'm actually interested in, and the other is "all", for when I'm up for a bit of US politics, Reddit-bashing and weird German memes..

Hey OP, I just want to say from experience the reddit bashing usually dies down a bit after a quick spike of reddit refugees like we're seeing now.

What I think you need to do is have multiple accounts, I have one with a LOT of filters. "Trump, Drumpf, Trumpist, MAGA, Elon, Musk, Tesla, Rep, Republican " you get the idea. Any community I have no interest in blocked, plenty of users who go into benign subs and bring up politics blocked...  Its my relaxing feed. NSFW filter on

 I have one with the only filter being the nsfw one. I see the whole disaster.

I have one on Lemmy.nsfw... for reasons. Filter by local... 



I have one 

Come visit [email protected] or [email protected]

Use a filter and remove everything dedicated to US politics and Reddit to reduce the quantity by 80%

Clearly you don’t frequent the NSFW forums

The majority of folk that migrated from Reddit probably did so because of reasons related to those two things.

I know - it's exhausting.

All social and news streams are absolutely being flooded by American politics right now. It's mad and crazy stuff, but there's only so much someone can take before it really starts to affect ones mental state.

And Lemmy partially started as a not-reddit, so I guess it's normal that people come to vent.

So - positive stuff you can do!

Subscribe to more communities that do interest you. Leave less space for the other stuff to come in. You can also block communities from your main feed very easily if you're being given stuff you don't want from them.

Youtube (with adblock) is hardly affected (or if it is, I don't see it). That brings lots of interesting and creative content.

Going out into the world if you're able. Reconnecting with nature, and also being reminded that people, by and large, are usually nice to you if you're nice to them.

And I've been picking up old games and playing them more. Escapism is not such a bad thing.

Those are the most popular posts. I recommend trying to find communities that you like and subscribing to them, then read the subscribed feed.

I was kind of hoping for more Western African culture, news and discussion from this Mali-based server.

Normal people don't give a shit about Lemmy. If you want to dive into hobbies, local news and other fun stuff - go to Reddit :)

Lemmy.world

Set your default view to the communities you subscribe to. Don't subscribe to communities that overlap with politics or reddit.

I don't see much of that stuff. I mostly subscribe to foss communities and I mostly see relevant stuff about foss and tech. Subscribe to communities pertaining to your hobbies/interests and your feed should reflect that

You do know you could have just asked how to curate your feed without whining, right? I mean, if there's enough negativity and stress in your life, why bring negativity with you?

I mean, I could give you the advice without snarkiness about it, but I want to make the point that it not only isn't necessary to complain about what content is there, it's counterproductive. Just ask what you want to know, and you'll get better answers.

The first step is to curate your feed.

There's three options: all, local and subscribed. All is going to pull in every instance and community that your instance is federated with, and has been visited by someone from your instance. To curate that feed, you block communities that present content you don't want to see.

For the subscribed feed, obviously, you only get the things you choose to subscribe to, so it takes as long or longer to set up as blocking on all. So you'll have to search your interests directly if you don't want to scroll all to find things to subscribe to.

The local feed is only content from your instance. You can block things as they come up and trim away things you don't want to see, but you'd be better off taking a few days to check out what instances have the least communities that feature content you don't like, then join one of those and that way need to do less blocking.

However, some apps offer filtering, if you're on mobile. Afaik, all the popular ones do, and most of the less popular ones, so you'd need to go to your app store and see what looks best to you.

You can usually filter keywords that way. I filter some of the more repetitive names that pop up in political communities so that it isn't the majority of my feed, but still lets in some that if I blocked communities, would restrict my feed too much. That's just an example of one way to go about it.

I prefer filters over blocks most of the time, with blocks being reserved for communities that are totally unpleasant, or aren't useful for my needs at all. Filters in an app let you really fine tune things.

For you, I think a hybrid approach via an app will work best. Filter the term reddit, block any communities that you find that are based on reddit subjects.

Then, block political communities that are US specific, and slowly filter out via terms like democrat, republican, and the usual politicians. That way, you'll avoid us issues without missing out on news that's relevant to you and your needs.

I don't think you'll get as well tuned via browser, even when alternative front ends.

I'm starting to see that most Canadians are more interested in american politics than in their own countries politics. When a gigantic behemoth is wounded, and about to fall, you get a lot of rubberneckers. Sadly, I include myself in this list.

How to use Ublock Origin to filter keywords out

Also you can block certain instances/communities/users. You can practice blocking users on me first!

Do you mean to tell me you don't also have a bunch of Linux memes?

Why are there obituaries in the obituaries column?

Customize your feed and/or block whatever you want to filter it, buddy. There’s a Reddit exodus because of American-centered events, so you’re going to see American-centric news and Reddit-bashing stories in some default feeds for a bit. Filter it out and move on.

Are you talking about Lemmy.world, or Lemmy.ml? Either way, I'd say to look for an instance that more appeals to you.

Try another planet which is not on fire, sorry for going all political on you!

I use the frontend called tesseract on my computer and block keywords "trump" "elon" "washington" "musk" "republicans" "democrats" and then I judiciously block communities that make it to all with stuff I don't care about like European boycotts and pretty much anything about Canada.

Sort by "hot" instead of active.

Man, I’m with you! A lot of people are commenting that you should just curate your feed - man, that means unsubscribing from news and politics. I mean there are a lot of other countries news I’m interested in seeing. And I already have an app that lets me filter out content based on keywords and my feed is still filled with US content.

The amount of US content is just overwhelming and it’s freaking everywhere. I know I’m not alone in frankly having had enough of it.

Can’t people post this stuff into dedicated US communities?

leave .world and block the entire instance and then you get stuff that isn't related to the United States it's really nice actually

Have you tried filtering the home page? I'm very new to Lemmy so my advice may not be the best, but on the home page (I'm' using lemmyusa), there is a "Location" option and I changed it from "All" to "Subscriptions". This way I only get the sub communities I've subscribed to.

I have not found a way to hide a sub community (i.e. hide "politics" or something) from the main feed.

If someone with more experience with Lemmy can sherd some additional advice for focusing content I would appreciate it!

1. Block a shit ton of political and Reddit communities
2. Subscribe to everything else
3. Only browse Subscribed

I block the news and politics communities. That helps tremendously

Just like Reddit, you need to curate your feed. Don't browser all/local, browse your subscriptions. Here's a list of subs that aren't political https://lemmy.world/post/16327122 - subscribe to ones that interest you.

Also feel free to liberally block communities. It's trivial to do.

Reddit was already mostly American politics, most of the people who came kept the same ratios. Personally I see more non American posts then ever on lemmy, it needs to grow. Post and spread it around

Godzilla, Esperanto, tiny phones, vampires, the weird knife Wednesday guy, and way too many silly Linux memes. Homelab, self-host. That's what Lemmy is to me! I mostly skip the politics, although I do like the odd privacy rant. Also, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, by Sara Wynn-Williams. That's unrelated to anything, but I intend to include it in any comment I make until I read it.

I haven't seen any Reddit bashing in a good while actually. American politics however, I have lots of in my feed. But you can filter them out, I don't because I'm lazy. I just scroll past those.

2 reasons:

1. Mods don't seem to give a shit

2. Lemmy has the exact same issues as Reddit, minus the corporate bullshit. Users do the same stupid shit. People don't magically become not fucking stupid and horrible because they move from Reddit to the Fediverse.

be the change.

As corollary to the other comments, lemmyverse.net to find non-political communities to subscribe to.

There's plenty of fun stuff that's neither of those. Check out photography or opossums or silly drawing request. That two sentence horror group is good. So is daily games.

Because that's what people are posting.

As others have said: filter filter filter. Lemmy is small enough still that you can massively curate by blocking communities and even users where you don't like what they post.

If you switch to programming.dev most political stuff gets automatically filtered away unless you're subscribed to it. Give it a try.

All I see is posts from "memes" I mean, I'm not angry, I just need to subscribe to more stuff

Lemmy is a giant echo chamber, every time I browse for a bit I block a community/user or two. And don't you dare have a differing political opinion to that of the hive mind.

It's not really a good reddit replacement but if like me you don't want to install the official reddit app lemmy can be some sort of nicotine patch if you take the time to block all the shit you don't want to see

Okay, cool. You filtered it. People post and participate in those discussions because they want to for some reason. I you have something you'd prefer to discuss, go ahead and start a conversation.