That is 💯% exhaustion, readily attainable by anyone but requires much effort:-)

Then get to work!

I think you meant to say wiser? (Or was it wizened? wizardacious perhaps? 🤪)

Edit: maybe… wizardlicious?

Isn’t ActivityPub extremely network intensive though? If all you wanted was a single user subscribing to a handful of communities then Lemmy would be inexpensive but to pull from a lot of communities I thought people have said that it can cost a bit of money, time, etc. Also defending against attacks such as CSAM.

Maybe make a distinction then between running a “tiny personal instance with only a few niche community subscriptions” vs. a small instance, either with multiple users or even just one person subscribing to many communities, if that cost would start to become more prohibitive?

Depends - what is their half-life? If it’s less than the rate of eye blinking, then we aren’t even keeping up a stable population!

Yes and moreover, feeds work at the community level, not individual posts. Which is a step in the right direction but you may want finer-grain control. Filters may offer more what you are looking for in that case.

I did not mention previously but PieFed also allows you to block all users from a user-specified instance, without requiring admin approval to perform full defederation. It is not perfect but it is very good and e.g. I use it to block Lemmy.ml, which saves me a lot of headaches as most of the worst, most argumentative and unfriendly (and batshit insane) comments I’ve seen come from there. Lemmy’s instance filter is horribly misnamed - it would have much better been called a community muting, as it blocks communities from that insurance but the users remain free to troll you in communities located in other instances, leaving replies, triggering notifications, etc.

The Lemmy apps Sync and Connect can also block all users from an instance.

Edit: also check out [email protected] - it uses cross-posts to build up a curated listing of “good” posts by some metric. Conversely, the entire instance of beehaw.org works the opposite by extensive manual curation efforts to remove “bad” content by other metrics.

I can think of 3 easy ways to do it off the top of my head… all using PieFed. (1) Straight-up filtering of keywords, which allows All, None, or Some; (2) user customizable and shareable Feeds, so someone creates a good collection and everyone benefits; (3) the entire model of browsing content using PieFed is different: by offering more than simply Subscribed vs. All, you can do something like not subscribe to any political or news communities (i.e. have your cake), so that it doesn’t show up in your Subscribed feed, but then when you want to read that content, it is a click away in the News and Politics Feed (or another similar one of your choice made by you or other users; i.e. eat your cake too).

Using Lemmy though, no not really (not “trivially” I mean). Search for people using ad blocking filters, possibly Ublock. Maybe an app would help? But I don’t know which ones and kinda doubt it - I haven’t seen such a thing in Voyager or Thunder or Interstellar, etc. Development of the Lemmy codebase, in the highly difficult Rust language, is super slow. Basically if you want something like this, you’d have to code it yourself.

A workaround could be to make several Lemmy alts - one for each type of content you would want to include in your Subscribed feed. Like one could be only uplifting news. Most of the time you’d be looking at the same older content though… without being able to widen your view that would allow bringing in of new content.

Edit: I did think of another way: you could run your own Lemmy instance, and use a bot to curate the content however you wish.

Or again, PieFed already has multiple forms of it.

Multiple times I’ve had the most heavily downvoted posts in a given community. Maybe I shouldn’t brag about that? 😉

But once I also had the most heavily upvoted too, so… it kinda just is what it is, at the end of the day? 😯

Instance blocking works on:

1. PieFed
2. the Lemmy apps Sync and Connect
3. instance admins who can choose to defederate
4. someone willing to go deep and make a custom web browser filter (presumably like Ublock Origin I would guess)

Nothing else works.

You used it the correct way 😉

Most people wanted more content then the niche subs could offer though.

Nowadays I do think like read physical books 📚😃.

It is not “rational discourse” so much as “emotional vomit”, assuaging loneliness with robots.

The only ones who win that game are the investors in Reddit, who sell more advertisements by using the “engagement metrics” that such argumentation ramps up.

Normal, satisfied people stop talking eventually, which lowers the profit incentive so they can’t have that, now can they?

It’s like gambling but worse - it’s not mere dollars that can stop upon running out of them, but people’s time that gets bled away moment by moment, until all the other opportunities they could have been spent on are gone. Taking advantage of people’s mental illnesses, which they help foster in the first place.

As a mod of a small(-ish) gaming sub, I noticed.:-)

One example is how on r/Android, people would ignore the daily posted and pinned (or perhaps it was weekly?) mega thread, and constantly ask questions like “what phone should I buy?”, “which Android device should I purchase?”, “should I get an Android and if so, which one?” Setting aside how these are impossible without sufficient details e.g. what price range, what country is the OP from, are there relevant sales they are eyeing that would make the calculations different than from simply reading the existing posts that all ask precisely the same question ⁉️… anyway in addition to all that, it made it extremely difficult to have discussions of any real substance.

Combine this with the engagement algorithms and Reddit pushes all that crap (bc it’s “new”) above even extremely highly rated content, even if it was merely a few days old.

Post flairs helped, except that submitters entirely ignore those rules just like they do everything else. User flairs as well, except… same.

About the only thing that really worked was writing your own moderation bot. Ofc the disruption of the 3rd-party tools by making the API cost irl money 🤑💰💵💸 stopped that from working as well.

In short, you must have been in some very well-moderated spaces, possibly also niche, and if you did not browse r/all (or rather r/pop) then yeah, you could miss that trend. But it was definitely happening, and people talked about it in the subs dedicated to moderation.

It did not help that Reddit continually made changes that made it worse over time - practically hiding the rules from new posters to a community, seemingly in an effort to switch the focus away from the roots (before I joined Reddit) of having multiple forums on one combined platform - e.g. each having their own design, like CSS elements (I even made some of these!:-), to having all forums be part of one giant interconnected space, with efforts to erase divisions when moving from one community to another.

i.e. the endless streaming of “content”, but ENCOURAGING interaction via commenting or at least voting, despite whether the audience has any business doing so, e.g. whether their interactions add, do nothing to, or even detract from the conversation.

^THIS

I also choose this guy’s wife

And my bow

etc. To be fair, a little of that is just plain funny, and I hope we can allow for such here on Lemmy (it seems we do actually, when offered with respect?), but when the comments are just hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of such in a row, such that it becomes impossible to find anything ELSE besides that… that is when a line has been crossed, and the platform becomes more difficult to read than it is worth. Imagine walking past a preschool on your way to work, and no matter how old you get (30, 40, 50, 60), they always remain the same - babbling as they play. Which they NEED, and hopefully you can enjoy engaging with it yourself. But at some point… don’t you need to get on over to work? When the noise crowds out the signal entirely, making more adult conversations next to impossible, then the only solution is to leave.

Or kick the kids out, i.e. moderation, but that requires enormous efforts. Some subs still do it, but the more Reddit enshittifies the harder it becomes.

And it’s not merely Reddit, it’s simply the nature of the game: https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb.

I wonder if Gen X’s truly “have” homes, or just have been paying on a mortgage, which at the rate 2025 is going might put them in the same category as Millennials, or even behind, so like Z?

Come, join us… uWu…

You say that like you have access to healthcare.

Google searches used to work, they don’t so readily - technology, and things in general, always change(s), but it would be hubris to assume that such will always lead to it becoming “better” (for who? how?)

PieFed is trying a bunch of new stuff that even Reddit does not have, enabling the democratization of moderation by putting more power into the hands of individual users (e.g. mods don’t have to be as aggressive as removing many posts with keywords when users who want such can set their own preferences via the built-in keyword filtering, which enables All, Some, and None).

Lemmy to me looks more like a straight attempt to copy, although the modlog is a great addition - unfortunately in the absence of notifications of a moderation event, lack of modmail, and presence of an obscured moderator name, Lemmy has somehow become even more authoritian than Reddit.🤷😳

Though with a MUCH more friendly userbase, and most admins, and ofc lack of profit incentive which all by its lonesome helps a ton.

Bc he’s just that chill, obviously! 😁

Never heard of that one - neat!

The average age of a Redditor started to go down even several years ago, long before Rexodus, in large part as the platform changed things to encourage speaking even without bothering to read anything at all.

Thus I decided to leave Reddit regardless, and only fortuitously decided to come here. Some things simply are not worth the trouble.

Fwy, some apps allow for automatically applied icons to indicate such. I forget exactly which ones, but I know PieFed’s web UI does it. It’s very helpful imho.

PieFed also marks people who receive like 10x more downvotes than upvotes. That way you can still choose to read their content, but seeing that, decide how best to respond.

I used to think it was that, but now I realize that it’s not “just” communication.

Like Lemmy for instance is somehow more authoritian than Reddit itself - not for an instance admin but for the end user I mean. While there is a modlog, there is no modmail, no notification about an event such as removal of someone’s post, no ability to even know who to DM to ask for clarification or appeal (the modlog used to say more, but nowadays simply says “mod”), and on Lemmy.ml people are routinely banned from communities that they have never even so much as heard of, for making a comment in some other community, and importantly, for violation of an entirely unwritten rule (that while the instance is e.g. pro-genocide when done by certain nations, any negative portrayal of an action done by other nations is not allowed). The latter, especially when the end user receives no notification of it happening, sounds an awful lot like shadowbanning to me.

Instance admins are free, mods can be depending upon the graces of their admins, but end users… are given whatever freedoms the admins allow. Just like Reddit, except less content, and no modmail. No amount of merely explaining this to people who tried Lemmy, got bullied (stories abound in r/RedditAlternatives), and went back, is going to convince them to try again. The tools themselves just don’t live up to the hype that people have already tried promising, and the development moves at a snail’s pace.

Though PieFed gives me more hope.