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.

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.

If you want people to be less depressed, that's one thing. Maybe you could be the change you want to see in the world, or something.

If you want to just not see depressing things, go back to the matrix and live among them.

Your choice.

Tldr: You're awoken to the horrors of reality. "Woke", even. Welcome, Cypher.

Post to communities that are less depressing and get more things going

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?