What content filters are you using to clean up your Lemmy feed?
In my personal opinion, this site is completely unusable without heavy content filtering. Just being picky about which communities to follow and users to block isn't enough.
That said, I realize I might be in the minority on this, so I'm curious what others are doing to preserve their sanity.
At this point it might make more sense just to have a home feed
But then you can't find new communities
People share communities all the time and there are communities dedicated to discovering new communities like /c/[email protected] or /c/[email protected]
I find it easier to occasionally exclude a community I'm not interested in than have to hunt for ones I am
Which is a pretty good advertisement for the fediverse actually. I'd love to know how many of those thousand blocked communities are still active, but not enough to bother working it out.
Just browse the list of communities once in awhile. Pretty easy to do.
Congratulations, you've just earned yourself a block from @[email protected].
I've similarly blocked all the communities I'm not interested in - to the point that my All feed is basically the same as my Subscribed feed, just with more memes on it.
Still, it's not enough. I don't want to block entire news communities, for example, just because I'm not into certain stories.
I even tried blocking users until I basically nuked my whole feed. That's why I went back to just blocking the worst offenders and leaning harder on filtering out comments too.
Block any community that is either sports, local area, news, crypto, AI, music, and us politics.
There's so little content, I can't imagine filtering it. I just browse All, sorted by Hot.
I sort by new
I browse my home feed with new, when it starts to run dry I switch to All, which does not happen very often. I filter mostly US politics.
If you sort by Scaled. Posts will be sorted by community size and smaller communities will not get drowned by larger ones.
Edit: added the missing 'not' word.
I see. I think you meant "smaller communities will [not] get drowned out" in your first comment. I tried it out and it does show more variety, thanks
Yes! I'm using a new keyboard app which can be a bit finicky.
I don't see now that's desirable
It's desirable if you want to browse diverse, niche and interesting communities without the bias of community size.
Nothing really. I just block idiots.
This! It works really well.
Who said that?
Nothing, I just never browse All. Being subscribed to the right communities is enough.
I'm raw dogging it, dump the whole feed into my gaping maw
Blocking the tankie instances does most of the work for me.
Personally i just block whatever crosses my feed that i do not ever want to interact with.
LOTS of weird porn, trans or women communities i have nothing to contribute to, the occasional user i personally don't vibe with. Certain political communities, most america centric news communities, there is tons of things to potentially not be interested in / annoyed with.
I only view by subscribed > new
The only posts I have to downvote are video links without text synopses.
Seriously - if you run a video community you really need to have and enforce a rule that gives, at the bare minimum, a brief description of what the video is.
I ain’t clicking on random YouTube links
I'm with you on the videos without descriptions. Pretty useless.
I've blocked tons of communities that are dedicated solely to posting voluptuous anime women, and one or two instances that are clearly dedicated to trolling and rage bait. Not much other than that I don't think. I frequently browse all, but if I'm not in the mood for politics and cynicism I just stick to my subscribed feed, which is nice to be able to do.
Those anime women communities are like a hydra, though. Block one and two more take its place
The anime women are the worst. I don't like anime, and I'm a heterosexual woman. I don't want to see my feed consisting of endless half naked anime women. No thanks. Make them go away and stay away.
Seriously. The anime and furry communities are nuts. I have blocked so many of them, and the people posting in them but it seems like every day there's a new batch to filter out. Is there really a need for so many communities dedicated to that?
I browse /all and block communities I'm not interested in.
I only block users who are spamming, trolling, or harassing. I don't really like blocking people. Everyone has a bad day sometimes and it shouldn't count against you in the long run. Of course, if you just come here to exploit people, I don't think you have anything to offer so I will block someone like that. I'm not here to spend money, so anyone who exists to extract money won't have anything to offer me.
I am on .world and filter nothing because there is nothing sketchy really...
I subscribe to communities I'm interested, from time to time I browse all to find new stuff, and block some of them.
Also some alt accounts to emulate the multis from reddit.
And on Voyager I use color coded tags for users. I try not to block users, that's just a mute button.
Thanks for the color-coded tags - I now realize just how little I’ve looked into Voyager’s settings. Though this might interfere with my “Wait, is this THAT guy again?” game that I play.
You can start playing "was my first impression right?", then add or remove exclamation marks at the end of the tag.
Voyager also has a setting where it can track the number of times you upvote posts & comments from users.
I have All because I like the diversity. But that means community, keyword, and user blocks are needed.
Obviously ML is blocked, quite a few NSFW communities, gender-centric communities, religion-centric communities, political ideology communities, fan art/anime communities... Basically if it's not of interest, or of social contraversy, and loud, it gets blocked because of the types of people it attracts. This makes for a relatively toxic-free experience, few soapboxes, but still a big diversity of posts and topics come in.
Keywords go in and out when I'm fatigued by US politics or the same headlines about the same people over and over.
For users, I find it weird that many Lemmy users are obsessed with their enemies or the things they disagree with, so user blocks get dished out when I see people behaving that way too. Doesn't matter what the topic is they're "discussing".
I just block bots and ml
Ive blocked worldnews and that seems to have done the trick.
I dont know enough about how lemmy works, but see a bunch of discussion about "let's defederate with other instances" so its possible that whoevers running this show is doing the censoring for me. If it works something like I think it does, I dont like the concept but am pretty happy with the results so
Nothing. lemmy.world seems to be good at filtering spam instances out without hiding too much human content.
I Block any AI community that schlorps its sweaty corpse up on the shores of All.
I filter foreign language subs/instances, not because of any disdain towards them, but just because when they wake up for the day, my feed is flooded with .de posts that I unfortunately do not understand.
I have no filters or blocks if there’s anything I don’t like I scroll past and don’t interact.
None. I subscribe to about 50 groups or so, and it's fine. None are NSFW or anything, some are news, most are hobbies or general interest.
I also never block anyone, I find that really weird. Been online for decades, never had a need for it.
I don't bother with all, I don't see the point.
Nothing. I just take what it gives.
😏
Blocked nsfw instance. Blocked Nintendo, apple, genshin impact and the ml news and politics communities.
That preserves most of my sanity. I dont actually find Lemmy interactions to be bad. Even the worst Lemmy interactions feel like there is an actual complex being on the other end of the keyboard.
When read a reddit threads it doesnt feel like real sentient beings. Shoutout to the beyond all reason subreddit for inflicting psychic damage on me every time i read a thread. Its been over 6 months and I'm still triggered over the guy who played for two hours and decided the game has to many units.
I only show communities I'm subscribed to explicitly in my feed. I also block users like it's going out of fashion.
Anyone spamming things I don't care for in my feed, trolls, rage baters, or just people posting shit I have no desire to interact with our think about on the regular.
I'm using Lemmy mainly as an aggregator for memes, cat pictures, sci-fi, comics, and the likes, and like to be able to browse it on the bus or similar without worrying about what might show up.
If it's not for me, I'm most likely in the wrong community. If that's not the case I just block the poster. Nothing personal, it just doesn't jive with my desired experience for any number of reasons, so I just block it, ignore it, and move on.
Lemmy is for everyone, and I can't expect all of them to want the same out of it as me, so I can't, won't, and shouldn't do anything else about it.
I'm personally using adblocker to hide posts with the following keywords:
xitter, united, ceo, c.e.o., exec, brian thompson, health exec, luigi, uhc, rednote, pets sunday, trump, elon, musk, nazi, fascis, israel, idf, ice, iceblock, palestin, gaza, project 2025, deport, kirsti, deepseek, rfk, it's monday, it's tuesday, it's wednesday, it's thursday, it's friday, it's saturday, it's sunday, hobbies wednesday, music monday, billionair, republican, far right, far-right, maga, doge, LGBT, pronoun, trans, gulf, christian right, nancy mace, abortion, immigrat, gop, migrant, x, measles, pedo, transgender, queer, bondi, capitalis, sandy, cybertruck, tesla, tsla, protest, hegseth, windows, executive dysfunction, waltz, detain, pope, usaid, netanyahu, palantir, curfew, Kristi, week-end, microsoft, fucklapd, epstein, ghislaine, slop, altman, nexus, kirk, genocide, zohran, kimmel, mar-a-lago, linkedin, crypto, comey, Stephen Miller, Kash Patel, transpho, zionis, antifa, racis, Jake paul, us aid, guard, patrol, snap, amazon, google, openai, meta, ai, scraper, ads
I also have a similar list for the common phrases used in mean comments:
xitter, x-itter, muskrat, douchebag, chud, acab, guillotine, piece of shit, pedo, boot, leopard, bibi, fuck alex, fuck zuck, fuck musk, fuck trump, fuck spez, fuck elon, elonia, twat, pigboy, eat shit, dipshit, dumbass, fuckem, fucker, shitbag, fuck nestle, dumbfuck, class traitor, idiot, fuck off, fuck you, depose musk, fuck matt walsh, fuck america, shithead, assclown, pukebag, cunt, avocado toast, temporarily embarrassed billionaire, bootlick, elon, musk
You're filtering out kirk and my first thought was, "what does he have against Star Trek?"
Well, I do have Star Trek communities blocked too. That said, I don't block stuff because I have something against it per se - I'm usually just sick of seeing it flood my feed constantly.
I even block topics I'm genuinely into, like AI, because I know the comment sections will be a total shitshow and I don't want to tempt myself.
If single communities flood a lot you could try out scaled sorting
Do you only browse /all or do you have subscriptions as well?
My /all feed is basically the same as my /subscribed but with memes.
With all that blocking, is there even anything left on your feed at all afterward?
4 out of 20 posts on my front page are currently blocked. I think the record so far is 17 out of 20 when there's a major event going on in the news, for example when Charlie Kirk was shot.
Oh yes, heating about Kirk got super annoying after the first post.
Should be 'walz' (I'm guessing you mean Governor Walz).
What ever event caused me to add that filter has probably already passed. Many of these are kind of outdated already.
I saw “United” and “Luigi” and was like dang, no one ever posts about that anymore.
I block subjects containing the names Trump or Musk. They’ve slowed down, but even with the filters I still get plenty about them. For a while it seemed like they were half my feed.
IDK, I just block NSFW posts in settings, haven't seen anything really objectionable so I think it's working. From there I block all the politics and news communities., that helps my blood pressure. After that it's just a matter of filtering the stuff that simply doesn't interest me. I honestly wish you could just whitelist comms or users to show up on your feed rather than having to block everything.
You're not alone in thinking that. I would not say it is unusable but it is indeed way too littered with, well, with certain type of content I'd rather not have to deal with.
I use feeds on Piefed. Take a look at these feeds with less politics and less tech:
back when I used lemmy instead of piefed, I read by "new / subscribed" and only subscribed to those communities.
filters exist?
This is my first time hearing about them as well. Are they something that isn’t present in the regular web UI, but various apps have added?
The basic blocking system.
Feels bad to use, though, blocking whole communities. I wish there was a simple "mute" button. But if there is I haven't found it.
Not sure if the algorithm for scaled could be better to try and find new communities, otherwise I usually check hot/subscribed first which helps filter it.
Blahaj modding and a few manual user blocks, plus blocking communities I’m uninterested in. I haven’t blocked any terms, because I don’t like the idea of missing posts that happen to match one keyword and potentially missing a post I’m interested in.
I don't block much, but one thing I do is to use list view in the apps.
Having ten post on the phone screen at once makes it easier to scroll over the boring ones. I don't understand how anyone can be bothered with the default card views.
Just .ml and specific communities around sex or identity. Individual users, tags are your friend
Block the comm. That’s all.
Common sense
I don't use a filter. I subscribe to communities that interest me. Keep NSFW posts turned off. browse by hot, scaled and multi cummonies related to tech and all that I like.
I block porn and anime. Sometimes users that post multiple times a day in languages I don't speak