OK, letās try this again. My post got auto-filtered. Maybe the image triggered something? Anyways, apologies if this isnāt the right sub for this. I wanted to get an outsiderās perspective on my experience on Lemmy.
Every. Single. Thread. has the word ācapitalismā or āTrumpā in it somewhere. Iām sick to death of it. Even though I agree with a lot of the sentiment, the erosion of the middle class, the concentration of wealth, the consolidation of media, the āyou will own nothing and be happyā mentality permeating the consumer space. In many ways thatās why I joined Lemmy, but dang it that doesnāt mean I want to talk about absolutely nothing else. Someone once defined a fanatic as āSomeone who wonāt change their mind and wonāt change the subjectā and that fits the average Lemming to a T.
And the only communities devoid of politics are also devoid of content. I do a lot of worldbuilding stuff, and Iāve tried to make the worldbuilding community there more active, but sometimes I feel like Iām the only poster. Then I look at r/worldbuilding, and thereās a glut of really interesting posts showcasing peopleās imagination and creativity, and nary a mention of Musk or Epstein in sight.
I understand that peopleās political opinions are bound to show up obliquely in even unrelated communities, but I canāt overstate how monomaniacal Lemmings are about it. The pic I originally tried to post was a screenshot of a completely non sequitur post in an unrelated community (sorry for the vagueness I think the specifics may have also tripped the auto filter). And Lemmings are always āonā. If you go to mildlyinteresting on lemmy.world right now, youāll see maybe one or two posts about things like yellow stop signs or three-chambered peanuts, you know, stuff thatās actually mildly interesting, and every other post is stuff like āFrench president explains the political consequences of AIā. Is that important and worth discussing? Absolutely. What it isnāt is mildly interesting.
When I bring this up on Lemmy, the response is always āPolitics is everything and we should never shut up ever!ā But even Anne Frank wrote about other stuff in her diary sometimes.
And then thereās the tech side of things. Hope you like Linux, cuz thatās all youāre going to see. And if you dare suggest that Linux may not be the right choice for your blind grandmother, you get eviscerated in the comments.
Granted, Reddit itself used to have a similar problem. It attracted a very specific type of user (neckbeards) and the experience wasnāt great if you werenāt one, but ironically the same popularization of Reddit that lead to its platform decay also solved this homogeneity problem. Similarly, Tankies and their ilk seem to flock to Lemmy, explaining the tone of the discourse.
Others have pointed out that Reddit alternatives tend to attract people who were banned from Reddit (remember Voat?) and I think that explains a lot.
In summary, Lemmy seems great if youāre a Marxist who uses Linux, but pretty much nobody else. Am I crazy? Should I try to stick with it in the hope it gets better?
so how do we get this guy on Linux? lol
Whenever I recommend Lemmy/Piefed to a friend, I point them to a feed with low/no politics and low/no tech:
Thank god and thank you, I dunno why the spam of politics is there. I go to protests every time, vote every election, etc. but itās mentally exhausting I just want to chill.
I think itās a combination of:
The way Iāve done it is instead of blocks I just heavily curate my subscriptions, have /Subscribed as default and almost never browse /All. The politics and news are all there if I want them, but my main experience is free of them.
It does require some effort to build your subscriptions, though.
I just noticed that Lemmy defaults to showing you a feed of all local communities when you open the homepage instead of subscriptions. There doesnāt seem to be a way to change that. Iām bombarded with the ragebait and doomerism that suffuses typical Lemmy discourse as soon as I open the homepage, and I have to click a button to tell the server ānow show me what I actually want to seeā.
Yes I know you can block communities, but maintaining a list of blocked instances, comms, and users feels like playing a game of whack-a-mole. If people here were more chill I might feel differently, but the rage shows up in the weirdest places youād never expect, and not even in an organic way.
Itās such a tiny change, but I think defaulting to showing a userās subscriptions rather than the local feed, only falling back to local if the user isnāt signed in or if the user has no subscriptions, would make a huge difference.