Not everyone enjoys the literally daily deluge of messages advocating for and defending the continued practice of literal genocide - so long as it is done by the “correct” side of whatever conflict - e.g. the constant (and oftentimes graphical) depictions of beheading landlords. However, others very much do enjoy that - so how do we all get along?
Unlike X (formerly Twitter), under Musk’s “benevolent” authoritarian reign, or Reddit under Huffman’s, the Fediverse is not a singular “place”. We are more like an assortment of loose pirate & free-trader ships, passing in the night, and conveying messages from ship to ship. This means that each instance gets to choose what is deemed “acceptable content” - and in a global context, there are bound to be disagreements (some will say that Donald Trump is the only politician who ever speaks the truth, others the opposite, and still others are tired of it, or of all USA politics that worms its way into entirely unrelated communities).
Below, I will mention some coping strategies, assuming that you are using the webserver UI of a Lemmy instance, although many of the strategies surely apply, with minor tweaks to find what to click, in Mastodon, Mbin, PieFed, Sublinks, etc., and in your app of choice (but also note: if at worst you need to modify your account settings using the web UI, it should also affect your experience in the app? ymmv there though). Also, I presume that you’ve already taken a breather, gone outside to touch grass, etc., and here I’m focusing on how to take action to literally change your experience on the Fediverse, forever (for that account). Whereas to people who want to see every comment from every person regardless of content or source, this post is not for you, just move along:-). Finally, note that I am starting from the most strict set of solutions - not that I am advocating for those in particular, but that’s just how the Fediverse works, so it is good to know about the choice even if retroactively after you have already made it.
Picking your instance
Some instances are known to be more closed-off than others. See also Lemmy Explorer. e.g. Lemm.ee and Lemmy.zip are among the most neutral & open, exposing its users to all political content everywhere, while lemmy.cafe is literally the only instance that I’ve ever heard of that has defederated from all of the Big Three leftist extremist instances.
A point related to this is that unlike such general-purpose instances as mentioned above, if you are exclusively interested in just one topic - e.g. for science, then mander.xyz; or for programming, then programming.dev, etc. - then you can just always browse by “Local” rather than “All”, and you will avoid all of the politics, memes, and general-purpose discussion communities on the Fediverse. The down-side is that you will miss the vast majority of what the Fediverse has to offer… but maybe you can tolerate it in small doses, and perhaps being able to switch it off & on from the same account is attractive to you (otherwise: make an alt account on another, general-purpose instance?). If this works for you then great, but I will offer many other tips in case it does not:-).
Picking your communities
Similar to the above, if you restrict yourself to viewing content exclusively from your previously “Subscribed” list, then you can avoid most content that you do not want to see. This is of course a very imperfect solution, for most people, b/c how do you discover new content, and entirely new communities, that way? Also, extremism tends to find its way (as posts or comments) into seemingly unrelated communities (such as communities labelled only as “memes”), so it is not as firm a solution as a user or instance block would be. But perhaps it will be sufficient for you, so I wanted to at least mention that it is a possibility.
NSFW
Quick side-note about this: many instances outright block NSFW content by default, while others allow it but require it to be appropriately labelled. Look in your account Settings to fine-tune this further if you want - e.g. in Lemmy there are 2 relevant ones: “Show NSFW content” and “Blur NSFW content” (the default setting for each depending on what your chosen instance has decided for new accounts), and then there are others that affect media content in general such as “Auto expand media”.
The point is, you have a LOT of control over this aspect, as people tend to be fairly good about labeling this content - i.e. whenever my setting is off, I have literally never seen a stray NSFW post in the past year since I came to Kbin, then bounced around across several Lemmy instances. This aspect of the Fediverse is tightly regulated and thus very friendly to people on both sides who respectively want or don’t want to see it.
Blocking instances
Unfortunately, people refuse to label “extremist” content in the same manner as NSFW. This includes the extreme Right - which mostly has moved off of the Fediverse entirely these days - and also the extreme Left, who despite calling themselves “leftists” seem entirely okay with fascism/authoritarianism, or conversely democracy and capitalism, so long as it is done by their preferred vendor of choice (top culprits include Russia, China, North Korea, etc.), but simultaneously tends to be vehemently against steps taken by the Western world to become more socialist/communist, citing how anything short of a violent upheaval of entire societies “does not go far enough”. Of course, this is my own POV, feel free to make your own:-).
Anyway, (much like the situation with NSFW) you should feel free to do whatever you want, so long as I also am free to do as *I* please as well - which includes not having to “enjoy” such content appearing in my feed on a daily basis. The trouble is that unlike the situation with NSFW, extremists tend to resist all efforts to either label themselves, or to be labelled by others. Therefore, I am going to offer my own list, which will necessarily be biased and imperfect. But my hope is that one day we as a community can get together and collectively decide “(value judgements aside) this is an instance that advocates for extremist policies, which many moderates may want to know about”, with the exact wording ideally having been offered by the very community that it pertains to. A tiny bit of consideration would go a long way… however, Lemmy is still in beta, and this aspect lags greatly behind that of others.
The goal then would be to, like NSFW, offer you a choice to not see such content, if you so desired. This will cause (a) those communities to not show up in your All feed, and (b) though you can still see individual user comments, you will no longer receive Notifications from users on these instances - you can reply to them and they can reply to you, just without a Notification sent to you each time (which if you have ever had experience accidentally commenting in certain communities, you will realize is a good thing, since consent does not always matter to some people who continue to dunk on what you thought was an innocuous comment for weeks and weeks afterwards). Note that they can still down-vote your content though, thereby influencing the degree to which it shows up for other people (and yes, brigading is both popular and allowed), when sorting by e.g. Hot - the only way to fully prevent that would be full defederation, mentioned below.
My list: 99.99999% of the time when I see the most batshit insane comment from someone - e.g. “where is your proof that the sun rises each day?” or “you are so stoopid, don’t you know that the answer to the question of what does 1+1 equal depends on various factors?” - they are from the same Big Three instances: lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, lemmy.ml, and lately I am starting to see it from midwest.social (though the latter with the heavy distinction that many of its individual users simply see the word “midwest” and don’t realize what they have gotten themselves into; and somewhat similarly for lemmy.ml but I no longer care anymore b/c it’s just too much from them, constantly, so I am willing to lose all positive benefits from associating with them if it means that the negatives can also finally be stopped). Mind you, even if you do not take issue with the content from such sources, the manner of presentation being so extremely often highly hostile can be quite off-putting to some of us - so again, if you don’t want to block them, then don’t, whereas this message is intended to let people know that they don’t have to put up with that.
If you go into your Settings (not Profile), in the Blocks tab, scroll waaaay down (if like me you’ve already blocked several users & communities), then you can add to your Blocked instances list. Occasionally I also find it helpful to block instances such as feddit.org that otherwise fills my feed with posts not in English, and kbin.social that unfortunately went defunct but before it did it went entirely unmoderated for months and allowed a large number of advertisements to flood the entire Fediverse.
Note that most instances will block many of these for you, so you may want to check there first (scroll all the way down and click Instances, e.g. lemmy.world’s list) - e.g. lemmy.world blocks lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net, but not lemmy.ml. Unlike a user block, an instance-wide block (called “defederation”) prevents any and all comments from those users from showing up on any post; this is widely considered a “last resort” measure when all other attempts at not even friendliness but peaceful coexistence has failed. But if you are on an instance that has not blocked one that you want blocked, I wanted you to know that there is hope, you don’t have to move, you can block them yourself, as a user - again they can still comment on your content, and mostly anonymously vote on it, etc., but it does mitigate the level of interaction greatly.
Block individual communities and/or users
This is much easier to do: simply visit each community or user in question, and click the giant Block button near the top of the respective community/user page. You won’t see their comments anymore, and I’m not certain but I think they can’t downvote you either? If you ever want to see their content, either create an alternate account that does not block them, or visit an instance where you are not logged into an account - e.g. the rainbow network Fediverse icon, next to the Share button, may work, if the content originates from a different instance. New communities and user accounts are constantly being created though, so this process will never fully end, if you want to scroll by All rather than Subscribed.
You can block a variety of things this way - communities for various sports, or individual places. !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone is a very common one to block, b/c it has a particular brand of humor that can be offensive to some even as it is attractive to others.
Notably, you may want to preferentially block communities and/or users, but save blocking instances for the most extreme cases where it will cut you off from a lot of content. However, now you know the most important thing: that the choice is yours to make:-D.
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Finally, this post could be improved upon in a number of ways. I do not intend this as the last word on this subject, but rather as a first draft to help get us started!:-) Feel free to plagiarize borrow any of this as you take the matter forward, to improve conditions for us all.
I’m not reading all of that. I deal with it by using an app that allows me to block instances, communities, users, and keywords. Block things as you see them. It’ll take a while to block enough to see a difference, but eventually it’ll change what Lemmy is to you.
Please tell me the name of this app. I need it, if it hides posts with keywords.
Mind if I ask to why blocking 196? I can understand that people might not like it, but I would like to understand why.
So that they can browse by “All” and not (have to) see it. If you only browse by Local instead, or for whatever reason had blocked lemmy.blahaj.zone, then there is no reason to block this specific community.
Since browsing by All can allow you to see new communities that you didn’t know about, and especially sorting by New you can see content that often gets passed over - like poetry communities - a lot of people try to curate their feed not by building up a Subscribed list, but by filtering down from All.
Mostly !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone, or some others (tho much smaller) by a similar name. I think there was one one Reddit too, which migrated here.
I almost dropped the Fediverse entirely, after making a comment in Chapotraphouse (that at least Biden was at the time bringing gas prices down which wasn’t nothing to combat inflation -> yup, I absolutely stepped into it, never having heard of that community before, and with me previously having been on Kbin.social, I was extremely naive to expect anything close to the level of reasoned and factual discourse that I had come to expect from most other places on the Fediverse).
Blocking hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml immediately improved my experience on the Fediverse by >95%. Then blocking Lemmy.ml months later improved it substantially further. Yes, blocking individual users one by one is one approach… but there is also merit in trying to salvage someone’s situation by large leaps as well.
Also, nobody that I tell about the Fediverse irl can handle it - the level of violent rhetoric here is not normal, for mainstream people. And most are therefore unwilling to stick it out for months until they can make it become closer to what they want. Even computer programers. People talk a lot about wanting to see the Fediverse grow, but I’m saying that federating with such instances is already turning away mainstream people.
It would be different if such content were opt-in, as in like users say yes show me these “categories” of topics, but as it is, the number of world-wide votes places it higher in people’s feed than less offensive content, created slightly longer ago, and as we are saying it takes much effort to have to opt-out, all the more so if done person-by-person (and even more when you have to take time & attention to realize that “a meme is not always just a meme”, but that it’s not due to an individual user or ten, but an entire community that consistently behaves a certain way).
Blocking hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml and Lemmy.ml helps make the Fediverse more palatable to a mainstream audience. They can always reverse the decision at any time, whereas if they leave the Fediverse, they are unlikely to return, their first impression having already been tainted by their earlier experience.
It would be different if such content were opt-in, as in like users say yes show me these “categories” of topics
That’s actually a brilliant idea. There was a tool a year ago that would take your Reddit profile and recommend communities to subscribe to, but that was just for your subscription feed. Your everything feed would still get all the default stuff. It would be cool if a user was shown a list of everything available when they signed up, and then they subscribed to what they wanted. Unfortunately most of the niche and subject communities are pretty empty, so there wouldn’t be enough content to keep someone here.
But unlike Reddit, the communities here change very frequently - new ones spring up all the time, and old ones receive fewer content delivery, or sometimes new ones spring up out of an old one.
Though if communities could be trusted to label themselves with category labels, that would allow them to dynamically update, moment to moment as someone was in the mood to e.g. take a break from politics after reading that for an hour, and now wanting to relax with e.g. non-political memes.
It would get complicated to label them, e.g. !memes@lemmy.ml is anything but non-political, and despite the leftist stance of midwest.social, the community !lotrmemes@midwest.social is mostly devoid of politics. So like… are such labels up to whatever the user wants, or whatever the community mod does, or an instance admin…? It would depend on the implementation I suppose.
As it is now, smaller communities tend to get lost even in the Subscribed feed - e.g. the largest poetry community is !poetry@lemmy.world with “only” 1k subscribers - so having multiple feed categories to switch among may allow less-populated communities to flourish more readily.:-)
Blocking hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml
Yeah that’d for sure step one for blocking some extreme views. It’s actually kinda nice that they all aggregate to a couple instances, just have to find an instance that blocks both or filters them out. I don’t block them personally but it’s fairly easy too.
Most instances - e.g. Lemmy.World - have already defederated from those two, though almost no instances do that also for Lemmy.ml. So it’s a matter of just how much of that style of content that someone prefers to block, and in particular if blocking merely a handful of communities from them will be sufficient, or if someone wants to block the user replies in every community as well. It’s nice to have choices, and I hoped to help streamline the learning process to figure out which option will have which effects.:-)
I’m still against blocking ml, just for !lemmy@lemmy.ml
Fwiw, I moved to Kbin.social more than a year ago at the time of the Rexodus, then bounced around multiple Lemmy instances, and this is the first that I have heard of that community iirc. And similarly I had never heard of this !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca either until you told me about it yesterday:-). The former is listed on the Lemmy.ml main communities page, but it is #43 (by the default sorting method - it looks like Users/Month?) so quite buried (and likewise this community doesn’t even make the first page, even locally for the lemmy.ca instance it is on).
Anyway, it’s a really good point that if this were to be taken forward, it should be noted that Lemmy.ml is one of the oldest instances, and that the admins/maintainers are the Lemmy developers, so anyone involved in advancing the Fediverse forward, or perhaps keeping abreast of the updates for the Lemmy code, may want to not block it. i.e. it is good to list both the costs & benefits of doing or not doing that.
That said, (a) I don’t think those are scenarios for the mainstream public - e.g. people fleeing X b/c it is becoming too politically extreme (how ironic then that we are even more so, not so much in an average sense but in a maximum one, though just calling it by a different name:-P) - and (b) anyway it would be good to have such things be opt-in, rather than have to opt-out of them by default. So yeah, somehow finding a way to explain the situation clearly and cleanly, and without so many words as I have used here. Plus, how would people even find this information? e.g. going to https://lemmy.world/, you see e.g. a “getting started guide”, but there are already so many comments on it that the auto-scroll takes many times to populate them - and using the web UI at least, we can’t really search through comments, until they are all loaded.
So maybe something could be done on the Lemmy Explorer? There is already an option to “include suspicious”, maybe something similar could be done to “include politically extremist”? Although I suspect in that case it would end up going back to being opt-out again rather than opt-in, though at least it would move things forward in the tiniest manner. Otherwise, for good or ill, Lemmy remains relegated to basically users of linux who will put up with such things, whereas mainstream users will simply not bother.
Only took me a few weeks to block all the reddit crosspost bots and anime spam.
I’m still blocking anime communities over a year later. It’s unbelievable how popular that shit is on Lemmy. I even have the keyword blocked and it doesn’t make a difference.
That will never end… they will keep creating new ones! On the bright side, that’s a sign of a healthy Fediverse. On the other hand, it shows how desperately we need technical advances like “categories” where we can turn on/off whole classes of communities, which is coming in some newer non-Lemmy Fediverse exploration tools (I don’t know how high a priority it is but perhaps it will come to Lemmy as well, eventually).
In the meantime, we make do with what we have.:-)
