I joined Lemmy a few weeks before the API change. I loved the conversations. I loved how the content was slower but more engaging, and less politically charged. There was nobody shitting on Elon Musk, or Twitter, or Reddit.
People were having meaningful, engaging conversations about random stupid memes. It felt like the early days of the internet… It felt like a small community of outcasts that all got together and posted shitty memes for the sake of giving someone else a feed of shitty memes to scroll through while they were taking a shit… Or not taking a shit, apparently…
But now that the Reddit API change happened… It’s like the super toxic part of Reddit was skimmed off the top and sent our way.
Every popular post is negatively charged. Every comment has an underpinning of hate. Everything is spun with some time of agenda that feeds half truths to make it look like whole lies.
What happened here? I thought this place was supposed to be better then Reddit? To not have some corporate overlord algorithm controlling us as part of some toxic hivemind?
Does anybody know of a Lemmy instance that has been spared from this proto-molecule outbreak?
A strategy that has worked for me: very quickly browsing all new, just looking at community names. I barely look at the posts, just make a quick decision if it sounds interesting to me. I’ll check the sidebar and decide from there to subscribe or not. I’ve found dozens to follow and a bunch to block lol. It’s cleaning up my feed pretty nicely and my home page has a lot of content now.