1y ago

Does anyone else feel the general lemmy instances are noise?

I quite value content from targetted instances, but most of the "general" instances seem to be memes, posts on boosting lemmy, memes, reddit, memes bot posts, memes, reddit, memes, discussion on lemmy mobile applications, memes reddit, memes, and people talking about how the lemmy changed their lives oh and memes.

I would browse hot on reddit as a way to see things outside my subscribed bubble but I have given up. The signal to noise ratio is terrible.

Is anyone else experiencing this? How are you discovering magazines?

38 comments

Definitely. I posted this yesterday in a similar thread about clickbait content:
This is one of the things that I'm struggling with right now as well. My reddit experience was heavily curated in favor of smaller subreddits, to the almost complete exclusion of top subreddits. The thing is, since Lemmy is so new, it hasn't had the opportunity to build up a diverse array of specialized communities the same way. So basically right now all we have are mainly versions of the "big" Reddit communities, along with ones that decided to emigrate here from Reddit.
But it turns out, content from "big" communities is often the same low-effort, lowest-common denominator stuff regardless which platform is hosting it. Memes, clickbait, and ragebait permeate the top results, because well shucks, that's what people want to see and engage with, apparently.
I'm hopeful that if/when Lemmy continues to grow, that it'll become home to more active specialized communities. In the meanwhile, I've been trying to improve the experience as much as possible by A) trying to subscribe to more communities and B) slamming that block community button like I'm playing Hungry Hungry Hippos.
I think it boils down to the fact that a smaller userbase is going to naturally gravitate towards lowest common denominator content because there isn't enough critical mass to form niche communities yet. It's low-hanging fruit to post an angry meme about Reddit, since people being angry about Reddit is why Lemmy/kbin suddenly have so many people. But of those, how many want to talk about inflatable kayaks or vintage calculators?
As far as finding new communities, maybe this page will be helpful.
- Yup. The niche restaurants and cool bookstores aren’t found in small towns. You gotta go where there are more people to find those. Online spaces are going to be similar.
  There are still a ton of tiny niche message boards, but for new social media sites, the bigger, the better, sadly.
- I'm not sure that small communities are doomed to have lower quality content, but it definitely requires more moderation to prevent spam.
  People also need to be better conditioned. They treat content quantity as being more important than quality, which is essentially the opposite of what you want when it comes to high quality posting.

Absolutely. I really wish kbin had a local feed for magazines. I don't like how it's either "subscribed" or "all", which includes every federated instance.
- Umm, you can turn off federation and get a local feed with a single click/tap. On desktop, the switch is on the home page at the top of the right hand column. It looks like 3 dots connected in a triangle with curved lines.
  On mobile I guess it is at the bottom.
  
  They just have to rename/move the option to be more clear. For all visual issues Lemmy's UI has, at least their local only filter mode is pretty clear to see and understand. Kbin's "FEDERATION ON OR OFF" is so open to interpretation I thought for a while if it was a toggle so that things I posted only stayed local and didn't federate
  
  Ah thanks for the tip. That's not the same as what I was wanting, but it's closer!
- On the sidebar, if you click the fediverse icon (the 3 dots with lines between them), you can turn federation off. This will show you only local content. However, this does still show local kbin users posting to federated magazines, because technically they're posting to the local copy on kbin and it just happens to get federated out on the backend. But it should reduce the amount of completely federated things you see
  
  Much appreciated!
  
  What a difference, thank you!
  
  Thank you for explaining this, I've had federation turned off for a while now and have been wondering why so many things from Lemmy still pop up.

It's the same for me. I've seen a few mentions of the feeds containing too much porn but I've not seen a single porn community/magazine or post, personally. I even checked my settings last time I saw it mentioned and I've not got anything set that should disable it (and I've seen one or two posts marked as "+18" so I know they can show in my feed).
It's not like I'm desperate to have porn in my feed - I'd rather keep my general browsing and porn separate, in fact - but I do find it odd that it doesn't show for me at all while other people are complaining about how common it is.
- I also noticed that and assumed it would be an issue but the only thing I've seen with "+18" that actually deserved it was some drone footage of some Russian soldiers in a trench who appeared to be giving/receiving a blowjob with cartoon Prigohzin pointing at it.

I feel it's mostly politics, which I really was not looking forward to - getting away from the fever pitch, very angry American politics constantly flooding Reddit was a welcome break for like five whole minutes, there.
I try to block most obvious political shit, it just doesn't help because there's dozens and dozens of subs shovelling it out on the "front page".
- I think we just need more users posting in other communities. I try to fill in to gaming when I can, but I can't keep up with the news cycles just yet.

Yeah kind of. A lot of duplicate material. But that's to be expected I guess. The ratio of tech to non tech stuff is too high, and I hate memes but that's just personal preference.
I just browse 'all' on my local instance every once in a while to see if any new interesting communities have appeared, and then I'll subscribe to them and go back to just browsing 'subscribed'.
I figure eventually I'll discover the best communities that I'm interested in but I'm not expecting it to happen overnight.

I would guess users who really want to participate, but having nothing to say. Memes are the easiest form of participation and everyone is unloading several years' worth from their folder like nobody's business.
Same with the proliferation of news articles, though those at least have a much higher likelihood of engagement. I'm not a very tech-literate person, so I'm really stuck scrolling by a lot of those.
The comments section can be depressing, and I sense I'm typically the only person responding to a lot of them at all. For a notably smaller userbase that should in theory carry more visibility, there's some neat stuff that inevitably dies in new.

Yeah I know what you mean. I mostly browse just “subscribed”. But i sometimes browse all and what I do is block communities that are full of “noise” or are irrelevant to me. The result is a feed that has mostly interesting things for me to discover.

Yeah the meme subs are a bit too spammy. I just play whack-a-mole blocking whenever a new one pops up. I go to lemmyverse.net to find new lemmy communities and browse the local magazines on the kbin instances to find new kbin communities
- Lemmyverse will show Kbin magazines too - it's in the right hand menu (will only show Kbin if selected)

Yeah, it's a bit messy atm. We don't really seem to have formed our own culture yet and things are still settling. Inactive comment sections are definitely playing a role in that but I think it'll work itself out in time

You forgot porn. I'm blocking unwanted communities as I come across them. Slowly separating the wheat from the chaff.
- For some reason, I see no porn on my All feed, only when I go to specific communities
- Wait, there's porn?
  
  So much porn, regular porn, amateur porn, furry porn. I have 18+ turned off and some of it still slips through sometimes.

You say "memes" like it's a bad thing...
I have two accounts, one for memes and one for tech. I browse by subscribed. Problem solved.

In the end it will be all about federating with the right communities and not about federating everyone anymore.
A lot of people who are defending "federate everyone" do it in the name of "fear of missing" and want the numbers at all cost. They are borderline addict to infinite content, but they are a danger to quality posting. You cannot mass post AND care about the quality of what you post. It takes time to find a good article to post.
Even here we will soon read about what Elon Musk had for breakfast and will post it in "tech". Some people want content, whatever the quality of what they read, even the title is enough for them. And sadly the current vote system works in their favor.
My guess is many of us will leave kbin for a more tight, content focused community. Also better tools will come up anyway.

If I wanted to see Lemmy posts I'd have made an account at that Tanky platform.

Glad to see this here

100% dude, it was so bad I turned off federation on my account

I'd love to block lemmy.world but keep communities am subbed to (whitelist|unblock)ed . Not just i don't care much for memes , but there's lot of shitty peops on there (racists|reply guys|.)

Honestly, I just blocked all the big lemmy meme communities from All. Instant improvement.
To find new communities I:
sort all by new
do searches of my interests
click on the profiles of people who make interesting comments and see where they post or mod
join communities like @MagHub

38 comments