In my personal opinion, this site is completely unusable without heavy content filtering. Just being picky about which communities to follow and users to block isn’t enough.
That said, I realize I might be in the minority on this, so I’m curious what others are doing to preserve their sanity.
I browse All pretty much exclusively. You can make it a decent feed, but it takes some doing…
At this point it might make more sense just to have a home feed
But then you can’t find new communities
People share communities all the time and there are communities dedicated to discovering new communities like /c/[email protected] or /c/[email protected]
I find it easier to occasionally exclude a community I’m not interested in than have to hunt for ones I am
Which is a pretty good advertisement for the fediverse actually. I’d love to know how many of those thousand blocked communities are still active, but not enough to bother working it out.
Yeah a lot of those were communities that just appeared out of nowhere and spammed my All suddenly - which was likely just one person trying to get the ball rolling with a topic I’m not interested in. Whether that initial wave of content ended up attracting an active community vs just fizzling out, idk, but a good chunk of them are probably ghost communities now.
Another good chunk are redundant communities - like 5 or 6 if those blocks are some variant of “To my badass hero” which is the same poster that keeps making new communities for softcore black and white porn… I can only assume in effort to circumvent blocks like mine.
The number of real/active communities on my blocklist is probably closer to a couple hundred - the rest of just the result of content whack-a-mole to clean up short term messes.
Just browse the list of communities once in awhile. Pretty easy to do.
Congratulations, you’ve just earned yourself a block from @[email protected].
Cocks banhammer
I’ve similarly blocked all the communities I’m not interested in - to the point that my All feed is basically the same as my Subscribed feed, just with more memes on it.
Still, it’s not enough. I don’t want to block entire news communities, for example, just because I’m not into certain stories.
I even tried blocking users until I basically nuked my whole feed. That’s why I went back to just blocking the worst offenders and leaning harder on filtering out comments too.
Block any community that is either sports, local area, news, crypto, AI, music, and us politics.
There’s so little content, I can’t imagine filtering it. I just browse All, sorted by Hot.
I sort by new
I browse my home feed with new, when it starts to run dry I switch to All, which does not happen very often. I filter mostly US politics.
If you sort by Scaled. Posts will be sorted by community size and smaller communities will not get drowned by larger ones.
Edit: added the missing ‘not’ word.
I see. I think you meant “smaller communities will [not] get drowned out” in your first comment. I tried it out and it does show more variety, thanks
Yes! I’m using a new keyboard app which can be a bit finicky.
I don’t see now that’s desirable
It’s desirable if you want to browse diverse, niche and interesting communities without the bias of community size.
Nothing really. I just block idiots.
This! It works really well.
Who said that?
Nothing, I just never browse All. Being subscribed to the right communities is enough.
I’m raw dogging it, dump the whole feed into my gaping maw
Blocking the tankie instances does most of the work for me.
Personally i just block whatever crosses my feed that i do not ever want to interact with.
LOTS of weird porn, trans or women communities i have nothing to contribute to, the occasional user i personally don’t vibe with. Certain political communities, most america centric news communities, there is tons of things to potentially not be interested in / annoyed with.
I browse /all and block communities I’m not interested in.
I only block users who are spamming, trolling, or harassing. I don’t really like blocking people. Everyone has a bad day sometimes and it shouldn’t count against you in the long run. Of course, if you just come here to exploit people, I don’t think you have anything to offer so I will block someone like that. I’m not here to spend money, so anyone who exists to extract money won’t have anything to offer me.
I’ve blocked tons of communities that are dedicated solely to posting voluptuous anime women, and one or two instances that are clearly dedicated to trolling and rage bait. Not much other than that I don’t think. I frequently browse all, but if I’m not in the mood for politics and cynicism I just stick to my subscribed feed, which is nice to be able to do.
Those anime women communities are like a hydra, though. Block one and two more take its place
The anime women are the worst. I don’t like anime, and I’m a heterosexual woman. I don’t want to see my feed consisting of endless half naked anime women. No thanks. Make them go away and stay away.
Seriously. The anime and furry communities are nuts. I have blocked so many of them, and the people posting in them but it seems like every day there’s a new batch to filter out. Is there really a need for so many communities dedicated to that?
I only view by subscribed > new
The only posts I have to downvote are video links without text synopses.
Seriously - if you run a video community you really need to have and enforce a rule that gives, at the bare minimum, a brief description of what the video is.
I ain’t clicking on random YouTube links
I’m with you on the videos without descriptions. Pretty useless.
I’m pretty good at mentally filtering out posts and comments I’m not interested in that come up on my curated home feed. Even in topics I dislike, there can be informative or entertaining discussions so I don’t block unless it’s obvious spam or a bad attempt at trolling.
I also don’t like the low effort comments such as “fuck (unpopular thing on Lemmy)” but then I realized that it doesn’t matter enough to engage with or be annoyed over.
I subscribe to communities I’m interested, from time to time I browse all to find new stuff, and block some of them.
Also some alt accounts to emulate the multis from reddit.
And on Voyager I use color coded tags for users. I try not to block users, that’s just a mute button.
Thanks for the color-coded tags - I now realize just how little I’ve looked into Voyager’s settings. Though this might interfere with my “Wait, is this THAT guy again?” game that I play.
You can start playing “was my first impression right?”, then add or remove exclamation marks at the end of the tag.
Voyager also has a setting where it can track the number of times you upvote posts & comments from users.
I just block bots and ml
I have All because I like the diversity. But that means community, keyword, and user blocks are needed.
Obviously ML is blocked, quite a few NSFW communities, gender-centric communities, religion-centric communities, political ideology communities, fan art/anime communities… Basically if it’s not of interest, or of social contraversy, and loud, it gets blocked because of the types of people it attracts. This makes for a relatively toxic-free experience, few soapboxes, but still a big diversity of posts and topics come in.
Keywords go in and out when I’m fatigued by US politics or the same headlines about the same people over and over.
For users, I find it weird that many Lemmy users are obsessed with their enemies or the things they disagree with, so user blocks get dished out when I see people behaving that way too. Doesn’t matter what the topic is they’re “discussing”.
