this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
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Why is my entire feed in this Lemmy server nothing but American politics and Reddit bashing (lemmy.world)
submitted 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) by BackgrndNoize@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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I came to Lemmy cause Reddit went to shit, so I get that people want to bash it and I also understand that most of the users of Lemmy are from the US and the shit show that's happening there right now, but I am absolutely tired of these 2 types of posts being the only thing in my feed, I open this app because I want to learn new interesting things, and maybe see some funny and creative stuff, there's enough negativity and stress in my life and I don't need more of that on my only social media app. How do I filter these topics from my feed and which communities can I join to improve my feed.

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[โ€“] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 62 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

You do know you could have just asked how to curate your feed without whining, right? I mean, if there's enough negativity and stress in your life, why bring negativity with you?

I mean, I could give you the advice without snarkiness about it, but I want to make the point that it not only isn't necessary to complain about what content is there, it's counterproductive. Just ask what you want to know, and you'll get better answers.

The first step is to curate your feed.

There's three options: all, local and subscribed. All is going to pull in every instance and community that your instance is federated with, and has been visited by someone from your instance. To curate that feed, you block communities that present content you don't want to see.

For the subscribed feed, obviously, you only get the things you choose to subscribe to, so it takes as long or longer to set up as blocking on all. So you'll have to search your interests directly if you don't want to scroll all to find things to subscribe to.

The local feed is only content from your instance. You can block things as they come up and trim away things you don't want to see, but you'd be better off taking a few days to check out what instances have the least communities that feature content you don't like, then join one of those and that way need to do less blocking.

However, some apps offer filtering, if you're on mobile. Afaik, all the popular ones do, and most of the less popular ones, so you'd need to go to your app store and see what looks best to you.

You can usually filter keywords that way. I filter some of the more repetitive names that pop up in political communities so that it isn't the majority of my feed, but still lets in some that if I blocked communities, would restrict my feed too much. That's just an example of one way to go about it.

I prefer filters over blocks most of the time, with blocks being reserved for communities that are totally unpleasant, or aren't useful for my needs at all. Filters in an app let you really fine tune things.

For you, I think a hybrid approach via an app will work best. Filter the term reddit, block any communities that you find that are based on reddit subjects.

Then, block political communities that are US specific, and slowly filter out via terms like democrat, republican, and the usual politicians. That way, you'll avoid us issues without missing out on news that's relevant to you and your needs.

I don't think you'll get as well tuned via browser, even when alternative front ends.

[โ€“] beerclue@lemmy.world 5 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

Any tips on filtering? I mean, I still care about some important international political topics, I just don't care much for trump, JD, musk etc. Also, Democrat and Republican might be present in other topics not about the US political system, right? Are there wildcards/regex/something else I could use? Some best practice guides?

[โ€“] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 4 points 9 hours ago

Honestly, it depends on the app. I only use a few. Sync, boost, and connect only seem to handle full words, no wildcards afaik.

Eternity though, it has all the options for filters. Tbh though, I'm not great with regex, so I don't use that on eternity. It has it though.

Generally, I only filter the stuff that clogs the feed. Filtering trump tends to cut out repeat posts that link to the same article, but since he's not always in the title, some news about him gets through, which is about where I like it.

Filtering parties definitely cuts out some foreign news, since plenty of them reference the parties. I haven't gotten flooded with those terms being allowed now that the election is over, it's a fairly manageable rate.

I guess what I'm saying is that I adjust what I filter fairly often. When there's a surge in a topic, I check the headlines and titles and pick what is going to filter most of the posts, but not all of them.

Like, right now, on sync I'm filtering "stocks" to reduce the tesla stuff without it filtering out other news around the company. If I filtered tesla entirely, I'd miss protests and such.