It seems like no matter how I scroll I find bad news. I know lots of things are happening but I just want funny memes and interesting stories.

I used to be able to get this back in the day on the Reddit app feed, but here the all page is always just depressing stuff. Back then, there was news and stuff but like it felt more balanced in the all feed. I could get bad stuff but lots of interesting stuff too .

I find myself engaging less and less and just avoiding Lemmy more and more since I know the moment I open it I’ll get whacked with more depressing stuffs.

I don’t want politics or world news or really even memes about that stuff anymore. Heck even tech news is depressing. I just want simple scrolling of fun content. Idk it’s just hard to describe.

Does anyone else feel this way about their Lemmy experience?

I remember an old post about someone getting AM radio from their sink (probably from Reddit back in the day). That type of stuff is so much cooler than my feed.

To that end: any recommended active communities on Lemmy with that type of stuff?

  • IronKrill@lemmy.ca
    15·
    10 days ago

    Step 1: don’t browse the All feed. I dunno how Reddit was okay for you, visiting r/all was always full of Trump this Trump that every 5 minutes.

  • YungOnions@lemmy.world
    11·
    11 days ago

    You are 100% correct, negative news has a greater impact on people than positive: https://assets.csom.umn.edu/assets/71516.pdf

    Media sites know this, and use it to drive engagement:

    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01538-4 https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/social-media-facebook-twitter-politics-b1870628.html

    And so, negative headlines are getting worse: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0276367

    But negative news is addictive and psychologically damaging: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/why-we-worry/202009/the-psychological-impact-negative-news

    So it’s important to try and stay positive:

    https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/benefits-of-good-news

    If you want a break from the constant negativity, here are some sites that report specifically on positive news:

    And here’s 35 more: https://news.feedspot.com/good_news_websites/

    Some communities on Lemmy you might be interested in:

    Remember, realistic optimism is important and, unlike what some might have you believe, is not the same as blissful ignorance or ‘burying your head in the sand’: https://www.learning-mind.com/realistic-optimism-blind-positivity/

    https://www.centreforoptimism.com/realisticoptimism

    And doesn’t mean you must stay uninformed on current affairs: https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/how-to-stop-doom-scrolling

    https://goodable.co/blog/tips-for-balancing-positive-and-negative-news/

  • Churbleyimyam@lemm.ee
    11·
    11 days ago

    In your Lemmy account settings, set your default feed to ‘subscribed’ instead of ‘all’.

    When you open the app or log in on your browser you will only see communities you’ve subscribed to.

    It will greatly improve your (and everyone else’s) experience if you subscribe to positive communties and participate in them.

    • HotCoffee@lemm.ee
      3·
      11 days ago

      Yes and no, since lemmy has a smaller user base certain type of content will have a much higher presence than reddit. And when 5 instances are all posting from the same source, that will saturate the platform.

      If every new user immediately gets turned off by it, because curating your homepage is like step 2, then lemmy will continue struggling with retaining new users.

      • CarbonBasedNPU@lemm.eeEnglish
        3·
        11 days ago

        Lemmy doesn’t really have enough users for the same type of mindless only scrolling in communities you like from what I’ve seen. On reddit I’m subscribed to 2 drama subs Gentoo sub and a few others. There is enough content in that for me to just scroll that instead of all.

        on the other hand here I find my subscriptions literally don’t get new posts. It’s fine I’m getting used to it but it means I’m using the all equivalent far more often.

        • can@sh.itjust.works
          3·
          10 days ago

          I use all a lot too but I still curate my subscriptions when I want a calmer experience (500+ subscriptions mind).

          One trick is to sometimes sort by scaled which allows posts from less active communities to rise

        • MutilationWave@lemmy.world
          1·
          10 days ago

          Yeah it’s a shame. I still like it better than reddit but damn. Civilization 7 is coming out in a few days and I haven’t seen a single post.

    • PartiallyApplied@lemmy.world
      2·
      10 days ago

      Yep, my block list is long. It’s updated occasionally. I call it “weeding the digital garden”. Negatively sprouts everywhere and it’s imperative to cull it asap.

      The way I see it there’s far too many things in the digital world to care about, so I just care about basically none of them. I’d rather spend energy loving the people I love than being angry at what I see on the internet.

      The internet is full of slacktivism and I find it’s more worthwhile to do something good rather than critiquing the bad and doing nothing.

  • OmegaLemmy@discuss.online
    5·
    11 days ago

    Add a filter for anything political that comes to mind, subscribe to fun instances (history memes, anime, shitposting)

  • Meldrik@lemmy.wtf
    31·
    11 days ago

    Why don’t you just keep away from c/all and stick to your subscribed communities?

    To discover new communities, I suggest subscribing to c/newcommunities

  • mrnarwall@lemmy.world
    2·
    11 days ago

    I’ve taken a bit of a different approach. I’ve been using a keyword filter to remove posts that contain any words I don’t care to read about. So no posts about trump, Elon, RFK, cyber trucks, etc.

    I am not here to get that kind of news, I do that separately with the news sources I can trust and verify. Otherwise any tabloid or sensational opinion piece can potentially try to ruin my day all in the name of getting clicks

    • horse@feddit.org
      3·
      11 days ago

      This is the way. I blocked keywords relating to Trump, Musk and the far right extremist party in my own country the other day and while some stuff still gets through it has made Lemmy significantly more pleasant to browse.

      I can read about that stuff elsewhere if I really want to, but honestly I think we might not even be in this mess if the media didn’t amplify those voices every time they said or did something outrageous.

      I implemented the filters using the Voyager app, but I think most Lemmy clients have similar options. On desktop my instance offers Tesseract which also allows filtering by keywords.

      • mrnarwall@lemmy.world
        1·
        10 days ago

        I do think it’s important to keep up to date. Even discounting the things I can’t control getting through my filters, there have been things that have directly affected my family and their jobs because of things Trump has done and I did not know about until after the fact. There is a line somewhere that you should be aware of, or else you may just be burying your head in the sand.

        Separately, I use boost for Lemmy on android. Thank you for telling me about tesseract. I haven’t been as successful with any keyword filters in browser

  • LordGimp@lemm.ee
    43·
    10 days ago

    Pornography is never bad news. Normalize more pornography in your life

  • NutinButNet@hilariouschaos.comEnglish
    1·
    11 days ago

    I just block a lot of communities like that. It’s easy in the Voyager app to do this on Lemmy. I also have some filters set up for some of the common words that are used in the doom and gloom posts like what you’re talking about.

    It helps out a lot to decrease a lot of the overly negative stuff.

    If you find yourself wanting some of it back, maybe you could create a second account that you could log into as you feel it is needed? Voyager allows me to switch between accounts very easily. Or it did, I haven’t had a secondary account in some time, but I did have that function last time I needed it.

  • highduc@lemmy.ml
    21·
    11 days ago

    I think places like Lemmy are better suited for discussions and ofc ongoing events and politics are a huge part of that.

    Have you tried 9gag and other more “lightweight” and meme oriented platforms?

    • mholiv@lemmy.world
      3·
      11 days ago

      This seems really pedantic. Recommending 9gag because someone does not want to see constant bad news is just a but out there.

  • morgunkorn@discuss.tchncs.de
    0·
    11 days ago

    i blocked every single news and politics communities, as well as all the “*** infuriating” ones, it has drastically improved the content of my timeline :)

  • Libb@jlai.luEnglish
    0·
    11 days ago

    Does anyone else feel this way about their Lemmy experience?

    The out of the box experience is not great (neither is Reddit, if you’re asking me, it’s at least as depressing to see the amount of trash/low effort posts on their home page). But once I switched to ‘Subscribed’ only view, things were already much better since I was only seeing content I was interested in (aka no politics or drama of any sort).

    As already suggested: [email protected] is good place to see what’s new, also there is [email protected]

    Most importantly, Lemmy is not Reddit for many reasons but this one is more directly related to your question: it’s much smaller (to give you an idea, I moderate a journaling community we recently reached… 300 members (of which less than a handful is active), whereas the Reddit journaling community is 2 Million+ ;). So, there is a lot less content posted on Lemmy. Back on Reddit, I was mostly a commenter (barely posting anything new myself) but I quickly realized that if I wanted to see stuff I was interested in on Lemmy I better start… posting myself ;)