Why is most content on Lemmy just old memes?

martink@lemm.ee to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 110 points –

I really like Lemmy so far, but sometimes my feed is just invaded by old facebook memes.

56

Don’t use the “all” feed. I only use it to discover new communities (but there is also a specific community for that).

For my daily browsing I exclusively use the “subscribed” feed.

Edit: the community I mentioned is https://lemmy.world/c/newcommunities@lemmy.world or !newcommunities@lemmy.world

My problem is that there ain’t enough content yet, so I browse all

Please help by contributing content. Lemmy will not grow and thrive if we all lurk.

Yes, but still, if you want more new content right now, you’re going to need to browse All.

The user base is a fraction of the size of Reddit.

I'm with you. I blocked the most prolific meme communities and the main posting bots and my feed looks way better now. Remember that you can click on the community name and there's a "block" option on the sidebar, which works on all views. Same with users.

Wish I could do this with instances. Personally don't want to scroll all and see a load of porn from lemmy.world, blurred or not.

I'll be surprised if that option isn't coming soon, a lot of people have asked for it. In the meantime, there's a profile setting for not showing NSFW content if that helps. Oh, and I'm betting that, like with Reddit, a giant percentage of the NSFW content comes from a much smaller set of communities, so you might try blocking those to at least reduce it.

Tried the blocking communities. Unfortunately lemmy.world seems to have a sprawl of these that for individual kinks I guess.

I'm not complaining too much that it's there. Just annoying that it pops up.

I didn't block NSFW content to begin with because I thought there might be some gory stuff that I'm missing out on, but it turns out it's all porn :D

I think none of it is actually on .world, it's almost all on lemmynsfw.com and a couple others.

The gore (or, at least, deaths, is in c/Ukraine. I'd rather see the porn though.

I do the same because there isn’t a single community that I care about that isn’t silent if it even exists. Pretty damn boring.

Can you tell us the name of the community you mentioned?

Because the people who left reddit for lemmy are the people who left digg for reddit, mostly. So old Internet people. Hence old memes.

Edit: my phone decided digg should be high. IDK.

I was on reddit before I was on digg, but yeah. My migration was reddit > digg > reddit > lemmy

I'll take some recycled old memes over the groupthink spam reddit has become. If I never see another buy GME apes strong post again I'll die happy.

I find it quite funny that you sometimes see posts here that say that they are glad that all the smart people left reddit and the cringe people are now all on reddit.
All followed by the most cringe boomer humor i have ever seen. Like some shit that wouldn't even get upvoted on /r/funny

Don’t subscribe to those communities?

Or post new content. I see lots of posts about people bitching that there isn't enough content they like, but few of them posting any content.

Yeah, I don't see this at all, maybe I subscribe to very different communities.

Because you subscribe to communities that are full of old memes and/or because you browse 'all' instead of your subscribed feed.

As to why the wider Lemmyverse has too much of that sort of stuff, it's because a lot of people are trying to recreate Reddit instead of building something new. Or because they're trying to kickstart the something new by posting plenty of content and, inevitably, much of it is old.

Post stuff you want to see. Engage with stuff you want to see.

Some people who like to post memes also like to post them in multiple communities, and crossposting can be much more obvious here than on reddit

I mean, it's the low hanging fruit content. It gets done engagement, some amount of almost nostalgia, but doesn't require much work to post. It's not the end of the world, it just comes in larger volumes and takes up quite a bit of "all". Honestly blocking some of those communities would probably work well to clean up your all feed if you wanted.

Unsubscribe from the meme communities. Problem solved.

Or block it so it won't appear under "all".

It's a total pain to have to go into the community, scroll all the way down, and then get an error message when you click the block icon. Or a login screen. It should be possible to block communities from the front page.

If I could mandate one rule for the fediverse that it didn't already have, it would be a hard ban on reposts, especially those undated Twitter screencaps that took over entire subreddits the last few years.

If I may suggest, start following federated pages too. Each social media has its niche, and now, with federation that allows direct communications, it's the perfect opportunity to find a social media whose features you like (which you seem to have already gotten), and curate your contents so it's perfect for you without depending solely on your chosen social media's niche.

You mean like mastadon? You're on kbin but lemmy doesn't support following microblogs.

Just checked your instance, and this page seems like a good start:
https://lemm.ee/communities?listingType=All&page=1

Then you can filter pages around, subscribe to pages as they pick your interest, etc.

Then, if it's anything like Lemmy World about sorting (can't verify since I don't have an account in your instance), you can visit https://lemm.ee/?dataType=Post&listingType=Subscribed&page=1&sort=New to check all your subscribed contents, and by newest (I recommend "newest" because I get the impression posts start repeating themselves after a while with other sorting features).

Are you talking about subscribing to communities?

Yes. ( also just remembered there are some mix up in naming conventions across the fediverse... "<.< )

Ah, right, they're "magazines" on kbin. I forgot too.

It’s because a lot of people here are people who miss the earlier days of the internet and are trying to recreate that feeling. I’m not that old but it’s got me feeling nostalgic so I enjoy it

The early days of the internet was waiting for 20 minutes for a naked picture of Pamela Anderson to finish loading on the screen. I'm not sure if anyone really wants to recreate that.

You’ve gone back too far! I meant mid to late aughts (2005-2010)

Probably because the average lemmings is way older than the average redditor.

It's possible, is there any actual data published on age distribution?

Great question, I don't think so. I just feel like that I rarely see teens here, or maybe even my age group is uncommon too to some degree. (22 here)

You can block the meme communities, then you won't see those posts in your feed.

I sort of enjoy seeing the ones I had forgotten about.

Yeah, I need to move off of all and start curating a subscription list. Before hexbear was federated there wasn't any need.

It's a way to add content and (hopefully) build interest in the system. It's also a way for Lemmy users to show they are just a little different.

new way of transmitting thoughts, through images or bots

I only use the subscriptions feed, so I only see what I want to see and that removes this problem.