An update to how many boring, repetitive communities I need to block to make Lemmy enjoyable

bachatero@lemmy.world to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – -165 points –

There's not much left after adding everything after linuxmemes!

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Why block everything except the few you like, when you could just subscribe to the things you want to see then stay out of /All?

I really want to do this, but it would be impractical to go through the thousands of communities available and decide if I like it or not. It also doesn't account for new ones which means I'd have to keep going through the list and look for the ones I haven't looked at yet. Therefore, I've just done it Reddit-style where I look at what's the top posts of the day and see if I like what I see.

You’re basically saying “Blocklists are too hard and white lists are even worse, why can’t the software just know what I like?”

How should it know what you like?

Bring me back to the warm sweet embrace of the algorithm, daddy.

Reddit was originally gonna do a per-user recommendation engine, and then it kinda never happened. Might be technically-possible for someone to do one. Classify content (download submitted webpages, run text classifier on them, download images, run image classifier like Stable Diffusion's Clip Interrogator on them), then look at what things get upvoted and what gets downvoted.

So, sub to the ones you come across that you like, then browse your subs most of the time and just check All occasionally to see if something new catches your eye.

That's how I used reddit and it worked out great.

Or he could as easily block the ones he doesn't like and stay in all. Just depends how picky he is. Granted, the fact we're having this discussion implies he's fairly picky.

That's a perfectly acceptable approach, but it's a bit odd to complain about seeing things you don't like in /All. Of course you do, no one likes everything.

I feel I want three sections in my app: one for all, one for a selection of subscribed communities, one for 'most' with a bunch of communities blocked. Maybe I should just use multiple accounts and flip between.

Or* a second subscribed feed with a larger subscription list, so my smaller list of niche communities doesn't get drowned out.

So wtf do you even like?

Judging by their post and comment history, their interests are very, very narrow

So are mine. I'm bummed that most of my hobbies only have a token presence (if any) on Lemmy. I have a decent sized list of blocked communities to make /all a bit less tiresome. But I'm certainly not posting that list and whining about things not being exactly as I want them. I just upvote (mostly), contribute where I feel the need (no, I do not have the spoons to try and carry entire niche communities), and hope one day enough people trickle in that those niches feel less like ghost towns.

In which case simple search and subscribe works well.

Unfortunately, I still have to use Reddit for stuff like r/RISCV, r/nattyorjuice, and r/NVDA_stock, so the only thing I come to Lemmy for (hopefully only right now!) is memes.

I mean if you start a RISCV community on Lemmy I'd show up. I'm sure a bunch of people would; seems like a logical extension of the FOSS movement to the hardware world.

so the only thing I come to Lemmy for ... is memes.

But you're blocking so many cool meme communities.

I personally block memes because i am blind and cant see them. There are just so many in "All" but i browse all after my subscribed to see if anything catches my attention. I have found good communities to sub to from all, but so many memes.

There’s a community for NVIDIA stock? Tf do they even talk about?

So… just subscribe to the ones you like and only browse Subscribed. Probably easier to do a whitelist than a blacklist since apparently you hate 80% of the content here.

Should probably be calling it "Allow List" and "Block/Deny List". They're more appropriate terms.

These aren't even racial terms, they were used for unionized vs. ununionized workers. Maybe we should be working on not calling people by color names. Not being able to use colors to describe things in the world because it is racially-adjacent is getting a bit difficult

That's actually not true at all.

The word relates to "Labor relations" by which it means the 17th century where there was widespread slavery of overwhelmingly black people by white colonists.

Blacklist referred to people who are untrustworthy, suspicious, to be excluded or avoided.

And white being good and trustworthy.

The term “blacklist” contains the word “black”, which can unintentionally reinforce negative racial stereotypes. Associating “black” with something undesirable or harmful can inadvertently perpetuate harmful biases and contribute to systematic racism.

While the term “whitelist” may not appear as directly problematic, it reinforces a hierarchy with “white” as the preferred or privileged category. Such implications can subtly influence our thinking and conserve racial biases.

And that's not too mention: Blackmail Black sheep Black Market

So no, its not that you can't call something by it's colour. But associating something bad with black and white with good harmful.

So, we're destined to make new words for colors because all the color words we have now are taboo?

Blackmail was used in England and Scotland to describe money paid by tenant farmers to a chieftan: https://www.history.com/news/where-did-the-word-blackmail-come-from

Black sheep literally comes from black sheep. That one is really obvious... https://www.etymonline.com/word/black%20sheep

Black market was more associated with anarchists that used black as their color than actual black people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_market

The goal here shouldn't be changing peoples' view on the concepts of white/black. We need to stop people from using those words to describe people. People (outside rare cases) are not BLACK or WHITE or YELLOW or RED, or.... how about we use actual people names for people?

White and black as colors and concepts are too important to have to tippy-toe around. If something is black, I should be able to say so without getting internet-spanked. Etymology means something regardless of what anybody thinks. You can't just make something racist because it has a color word in it.

Can everybody just stop looking for things to be mad about for a hot minute?

All your references confirm what I'm saying.

Blackmail literally speaks to what I'm saying, ie. Black Market ie. Slavery (including after abolition). Dirty. Lesser. Unusable. Prostitution. People trafficking.

Yes, how about we actually use the names of people.

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I got you OP - my blocklist is now 100s of communities. But I much rather browse all and discover new things, rather than sub to a couple specific communities and never discover anything new.

I wouldn’t call it mildly infuriating though. Its just how I choose to browse

Same. I tend to block all the local communities. Like tbh I don't really care what's happening in like Boston

Me too! I like to browse all to see new communities. The difference is that I don’t find it annoying. When I come across a new community I block it. At this point it’s only once a week or so that I find one.

You should just delete your Lemmy app and exclusively watch Disney movies and play with your legos

Stop trying to tempt me into a healthy lifestyle

Just keep an eye on your marshmallow intake, we don't want you getting the diabetes

Marshmallows are my comfort food to distract me from falling back into my Lemmy addiction.

Just don't start melting em down like those mellowhead junkies down on 3rd. I care about you too much homie

I mean that's the point of self-curated feed. Do you want an algorithm or a team of strangers to find and curate what you should consume?

or maybe facebook, instagram, twitter is more up your ally.

I think Xitter / "Truth" Social is probably more your scene.

Yeah, no. Just because one isn't far left doesn't mean they are far right. There is a middle ground you know.

Not to mention truth social is kind of toxic

You could whitelist communities rather than trying to blacklist them.

The larger the Threadiverse grows, the more communities that you might not like that will be out there.

I'm torn between blocking a community and being the change Lemmy needs. There are a lot of sensationalists on here and clickbait. I really wanted to bring discourse and niche passion to Lemmy, and some communities are wonderful, but man, there are some bad apples here; a wild West of unmoderated reddit soapboxes and megaphones.

I keep trying to think of ways to help, but solutions start to lean towards reddit style moderation (which pissed off users) or defederation (which will fracture this whole project).

I am hopeful though.

It is getting better if you look at the mod log. I would also pick a instance that doesn't lean left

Came here since the Reddit 3rd party app fiasco. Initially I blocked a load of non English language communities which at the time seemed to fill the All feed. Kept adding to my subscribed communities list then in my app (Voyager after Liftoff stopped being developed) blocked a load of keywords, essentially Trump/US politics related.

Now my Home (subscriptions) feed has some great content. I check out All from time to time to see if I can subscribe to more communities.

Niche communities are still lacking but hopefully that improves over time.

Have you got your language set on your account? (Open settings on browser not app) It should auto filter based on that. I see very little non English stuff. (Small instance though)

A couple on there that I missed ... on my include list that is. Thanks.

Some of those have one post a week on a good week, so yer obviously trolling.

I don't really get why you need to block communities. I block users but that is because they comment and post about communism on every single community. Luckily there are only a handful of users who do this.

I do wish Lemmy was a little more politically neutral. I just try to ignore the political stuff. I also choose a instance that isn't focused on politics.

why? because you don't want to see certain things in your feed. people come hwre for various things. some people come here to mentally relax, so they don't want to hear about negative topics like wars or people Fighting all the time. other people just are not interested in certain topics or posts but have them flood their feed.

example: i come here for relaxing mentally and to see posts about topics I'm interested in. so I don't want to see negative stuff like causalities in wars, hearing people complain what bad things they experienced this day, what stuff has gone wrong in their life and other negative stuff. another example is lemmynsfw where I don't want to see males showing their genitals to me since I'm interested in women, not guys. so i block communitys who are about such things.

short: because people don't want ro see certain stuff. that's why there is a block function. lemmy without a block function wouldn't be useable since you get flooded with tons of posts you aren't interested in by default without any blocks.

I personally just don't subscribe to communities overrun by communists. I am not saying the ability to block communities is bad, I just don't use it myself

My community block list is about 450 items long and the one for users is even longer.

Blocking is the boring way. Shit post until they ban you.

I do nothing but shit post and nobody's banned me yet. A whole lot of folks have blocked me though.

Edit: I take it back, I was banned from shower thoughts it seems, yesterday, but not a lemmy.world site ban. The admins didn't like kbin doing something it seems. Strange.

Banned
roguetrick from the community Showerthoughts
reason: This account is currently sending large amounts of unusual activities to Lemmy.World. This community ban is an attempt to mitigiate the issue without blocking kbin.social entirely. The issue needs to be addressed on kbin.social prior to us being able to lift this community ban.

We don't get messages on kbin so I wasn't notified.