Politics is important. If anything it's the most important thing right now. You can try to make your own bubbles but eventually it will reach you. I'm sorry but we just don't have the privilege of ignoring reality. Hopefully we'll go back to those times in pur lifetime.
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
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What you're missing is the algorithm.
You didn't want to see that on Reddit, and it's designed to steer away. Lemmy doesn't decide what you see. You have to curate your own feed through a long process of blocking users and communities and using subscribe rather than a steady diet of all.
There's also no curated algorithm to cause that dopamine rush, that causes the addiction, so you want to scroll and hit those juicy dopamine posts, but without the manipulation designed to keep you engaged and stuck, not going to happen. So it's also a great place to detox from your brain being in the habit of seeking dopamine that way, it's like a slow lowering to the ground, instead of cold turkey.
I was really feeling the loss of those dopamine hits, when I first transitioned over here, but now I don't look for those hits here at all, and I can just enjoy a small scroll, without getting stuck in here, and put my phone down, which is nice.
What reddit and Facebook do, is hugely manipulative and created and curated to trap you there. I don't know if that needs to be the same here, as much. And maybe curating your home page, really is the way to go.
I don't like how people talk about The Algorithm™ as though any feed algorithm is inherently a problem and exists to keep people trapped in the app.
I'd love to have an algorithm automatically curated my feed so I don't have to manually curate it, since the curation tools are so coarse.
PieFed categories of communities do this, with user-customizable and shareable Feeds. Perhaps check out PieFed.ca - it has the same set of admins that you have now, and even without an account you can view these and then subscribe to those communities in your Lemmy one, see full list at https://piefed.ca/topics.
I mean curation by community is too coarse. Often communities have a mixture of posts I'm interested in and posts that I'm not.
The idea of communities makes sense from a moderation perspective, but I don't like it from a feed/search perspective.
What would be more ideal? The tighter focus that e.g. subreddits provided? More niche communities here keep dying off, so that we cannot have e.g. a community based on a single game, so much as a community like just "gaming".
PieFed has a bunch of features that may help - post flairs (e.g. see posts about the Threadiverse but not Mastodon-style Fediverse posts), user flairs (e.g. see posts by senior "enthusiasts" in a community while excluding all those "hey all I am new and I love the Threadiverse so far"), or do direct keyword filtering. There are also user icons that you can place next to people's account names to help you visually spot posts from people that you might want to either specifically read or perhaps avoid, but whom you did not want to simply block. You can also "follow" users too, receiving notifications whenever they post.
Also, since you can always find content in those categories of communities / Topic Feeds, you can fine-tune your actual subscriptions more so that you make it tighter in the general sense. i.e. I'm saying that you can both have your cake and eat it too! e.g. I unsubscribed from the most popular politics communities, which keeps it out of my Subscribed feed and allows other posts - even low-interaction stuff (with <10 upvotes) like poetry - to come through, but then whenever I want more I can always view those posts from a politics Feed, so nothing is "lost" that way.
PieFed offers a significantly more robust set of tools than Lemmy. Though in general the entire Threadiverse is niche, and cannot replace what Reddit had - like better post organization (across communities) is great and all, but when the actual content creators choose to submit to Reddit but not here, then there is only so much that can be done about that.
The Threadiverse isn't like "dying" or anything, but it's definitely not thriving either, when we used to have 65k active users while now we have 35k - people are leaving us in droves and not coming back.
Automatic personalized feed curation, imo, would make it better, based on tags added by the author, by the reader, and by automatic classification, which is then weighted against your previous interaction with posts with those tags and explicit user preferences regarding those tags.
In other words, an option for an automatic personalized feed algorithm. But people here (and the devs) are against it because it's a boogeyman.
That said piefed at least lets multiple tags be added to a post where Lemmy doesn't, so that's the minimum bar for something like what I'm describing.
But it's a chicken and egg problem because the tags aren't helpful for manual or automatic curation until more people actually use them accurately. So tldr I don't have a solution.
It sounds like you might enjoy TikTok. Those Algorithms exist for a reason - they give people what they want. Sometimes they can be overzealous, like you watch just ONE video in YouTube and it starts showing you more like it... but overall people use those platforms because they enjoy what they offer to them.
And as you say, PieFed takes giant leaps towards offering a user power to find what they want, e.g. in providing hashtags, which of course so few people use since even if they submit a post to a community on PieFed that would support them, if you do that from a Lemmy account, or via a 3rd-party app that does not provide (easy) support for hashtags, then the post will have none.
The entire Threadiverse is an experiment. To see what people will build, and to see what the community overall will use. It's sad to see it struggling so much but... writing code it turns out is so much easier than engendering consensus among people.
In the meantime, I now suggest to people that they not rely upon the Threadiverse and especially Lemmy as their sole source of social media. The tools are still being built, and even then something like 99% of what is already available is simply not being used, and the primary thing is Content - or you might argue rather interactions with people - both of which are fairly lacking here. e.g. so many major events happening irl that I don't even hear about the tiniest bit about here, and many times I have even searched the Threadiverse for keywords after I've learned about the topic elsewhere in case it was here but I simply missed it, only to find that as far as the Threadiverse is concerned the topic simply does not exist. Our low number of content creators is simply insufficient to fully replace Reddit or other sources, unless one's goal is simply masturbatory dopamine hits from exclusively looking at memes, or arguing about which facts exist or not (were there any fatalities in the Tiannamen Square Massacre or not?).
I do enjoy tiktok, although the longer it exists (and the longer it's under American control) the more I feel the negative effects of "the algorithm" in that it's not just building an echo chamber by accident but it's intentionally showing me or not showing me things for their own gain.
I want an algorithm, but I don't want an Algorithm ™
I hope piefed takes off because I like it. But still maybe it's for the best that I use it as an excuse to disconnect completely from social media
It's dangerous for sure - both collectively (e.g. it has been demonstrated how they can map out military bases and movements following the patterns of when either the or even the surrounding people login, or perhaps do not log in during certain periods of time), and in a sense perhaps individually for people (this is probably most people) who are susceptible to additive behaviors. Although ofc forewarned forearmed and all of that, so just like any source of positive reinforcement (alcohol, drugs, gaming, even unquestionably "healthy" activities such as exercise and working), it needs to be used appropriately i.e. kept in check. "The unexamined life is not worth living", and all that.
I should note that it was not America that made TikTok that way - at least not directly. That company has always done those activities. Capitalism always sells not what people want but what the company desires to sell them. If we want different - e.g. Loops or like PeetTube and Pixelfed and such - then we have to build it. The code is not simply going to spill out of a random generator and then email itself to us:-) - it requires a staggeringly enormous amount of effort.
And that is the problem. I, like you and most of us here, want an algorithm that isn't Their Algorithm, but what we end up with instead still ends up being a form of Algorithm, just fueled by upvotes (vulnerable to disinformation) rather than monetary gain.
And we should all disconnect - I would argue not entirely, but stepping back a bit may do us all a world of good. Spend most time with people irl, spend only a little learning here, and don't neglect other sources that are significantly better as primary or secondary or even tertiary means of getting information. Other than Reddit though, which is where the content creators are, I am not sure more specifically what that may look like but now I know the task ahead of me: to find that.
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You curate the content you see on your own, doesn't have to be political if you don't want to.
I suggest to use https://lemmyverse.net/ to find communities you like and keep the feed to subscribed, so you see them and them only.
this way, Lemmy is actually good, no algorithm, I choose what to see and that's a beautiful thing.
You can shape the All feed to your liking by blocking communities that regularly post stuff you don't like. I did this with meme communities and rarely see any memes anymore. Sometimes it's a whole instance that is full of communities you don't want to see, then you might want to block it. Examples of those for me are ani.social for sexualized anime and fedinsfw.app for NSFW content.
Once you do this kind of trimming, the All feed becomes a lot less annoying.
There’s lots of content on the Threadiverse that I find pointless or dumb, but that’s why I only subscribe to communities that interest me… If I feel like punishing myself, I go to /all 😂😁😘
Agreed. Too much politics. I started my own communities for things I'm interested in and I recommend you try that.
There's a couple ways to use Lemmy and make it nicer to use, one is curating a well fleshed out subscribed list, the other is using all but blocking every community that doesn't interest you or has topics you actively dislike, making it just as pleasant as your subscribed view.
Personally I do both. My subscribed view is just things I like and no news communities. My All feed blocks everything I don't like, let's me discover new communities, and gives me a dose of news when I want it.
I blocked all the manga shit. And life is now good.
You can just curate your experience by making changes to the feed and shutting off what you feel are sources of distressing content.
Given the current state of affairs where if being a progressive American is a harrowing struggle, it's not surprising the fediverse is a refuge and outlet for angry progressives and people who have been alienated by spez's war on left-leaning content, as he will ban anyone even remotely or casually talking of committing violence on awful fascists and robber barons.
Agreed. Wish there would be a political filter similar to the nsfw one. In that way you wouldn't have to isolate yourself to certain subs
Tell me all about the political shit going on mate! I blocked them, keywords + communities. Lots of USA communities that never end but populate for no reason.
You can set default subs to show, and block communities. It's much nicer to look at the news when you want to rather than all the time.
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