Fediverse

Most of what's happening in politics is bad

A lot of the people who have fled Twitter to Mastodon are the most... online, with strong political opinions.

Even though I usually agree with them, I find it exhausting and the opposite of fun to be bombarded with outrage politics 24/7, so I'm pretty careful about the accounts I follow.

That sounds a lot like twitter

I don't know. I picked some hashtags to follow, and now my feed is full of cats.

"Trending" is going to show you the topics that are getting the most engagement. Political content almost always gets a lot of engagement, because people will argue back and forth with each other, and each new reply will boost that post further up the ranking. It's just the nature of that particular sorting method.

I follow digital art hashtag and now my feed full of art and furry art. But it's better than looking at US politics posts that i never understand.

The front page of lemmy.world has a similar tone. Frankly I have enough problems to deal with in my own life - to willingly browse something designed to piss you off and remind you that people you disagree with exist is just pointlessly distressing. Yet this is what the majority of Lemmy and Mastodon people are choosing to do if the numbers are to be believed.

The best way to follow news is RSS or via an aggregator. I recommend SPIDR, which organizes stories from different publications under one shared headline. You can click the flag in the top left to pick the news from your country.

This is why I can never get into microblogging/Twitter-type platforms. Character limits and one-click reposting mean that what little discourse you get is shallow, and ragebait is consistently pushed to the top.

I'm not going to say that Lemmy or (especially) Reddit completely avoid this, but you generally get much more insightful conversation and can opt-in to political communities.

There was a thread on !asklemmy@lemmy.ml recently asking people for their unpopular political opinions, and it actually wasn't a total shitshow!

It's easier to bitch about what's wrong than to actively do something to make it better.

I found the better way to use Mastodon was to follow users/hashtags of interest and then filtering out most of the topics which produce ragebait. It means my feed isn’t as busy but I also get none of the ragebait.

Just like any discourse on politics ever. It's less common to hear people praising a decision than criticising.

On a tangent, that's why it's important to loudly say when you agree with something, rather than quietly assume it's just normal. Regardless of which party it comes from. Politicians are very sensitive to public perception.

I thought the selling point behind most Twitter like services is that it's focused on negative positioning. E.g. things that are negative focused get more attention and engagement

I don't think people appreicate the old axiom "when you look into the abyss, it also looks into you" in this case. For a long time, corporate social media algorithms drove what content you saw. This tended to be "outrage" content, because as others have mentioned, it gets clicks. But marinate in that long enough and YOU become the source of the outrage clickbait. The algorithm starts people down that path until their mentality becomes self-reinforcing. They post what they're used to posting -- angry stuff. And they seek out more even without behind-the-scenes manipulation of their feed. Now imagine all those Twitter refugees landing in the Fediverse with that kind of outlook. It's not surprising that outrage and bile are trending.

The way to break this cycle is... just ignore it. I have an extensive list of keyword filters on Mastodon. It screens out 99% of the political content. I just don't want to see it. I'm here to engage with people who share the same passions and hobbies as myself. THAT'S what makes my Fediverse social media experience better. It's not a magical function of crossing the corporate/open-source boundary. I have to be responsible for curating my feed according to what I want to seek.

The same goes for Lemmy. I'm using Leomard as my client on macOS, and it allows me to block out any Lemmy instances I don't want to see. And I set my default view to "subscribed," not "local" or "all." That prevents me from getting psychologically drenched with whatever angry or trollish content might be lurking in those feeds when I open the client. I also sort by "new" rather than "hot," "most comments," etc. It's great that people have opnions about things, but I find relying on up/downvotes to be a poor way of discovering the content I want.

Long story short (too late): your social media experience in the Fediverse is yours to shape. If you rely on the defaults and flow with the tide, you'll likely end up somewhere you don't want to be. If you trim your sails and take the wheel, there are all sorts of wonderful destinations out here.

Don't use other people's anger and unhappiness as your compass.

People have been trained by corporatist ad-click-driven "angagement"^1^-oriented antisocial media that all online communication is rage-fuelled.

No, wait. This doesn't explain BITNET, FidoNet, USENET, etc. which predate such antisocial media by decades...

New theory: people online tend toward being assholes because they're not in imminent danger of taking a punch to the nose for it.

^1^ "angagement": a portmanteau of "anger" and "engagement"

I had to mute all elon hate (love?) in mastodon. I need filters in lemmy to do the same.

Why is everybody so obsessed with the guy? Don't like xitter? Don't log in. That's it.

I use Tusky and I never see these trending posts. It's great because I'm sick of the tedious political shite from all sides on Twitter, I don't need it on Mastodon as well.

I've deleted my main Masto account, I am so tired of the "if you like x then you hate y" which is just so frustrating and counterintuitive to a constructive debate. If you don't agree with their opinion it's because you are a racist Nazi that supports the genocide of trans people as well as being pro-billionnaire...

The main example of this is the whole Meta Threads federating with Activitypub, if you somehow see good things with this, it's because you support giving a platform to Nazis and transphobes, which is just so far from the truth.

The weird negative point of mastodon is it massively facilitates being stuck inside an echo chamber because you can literally defederate with any instance that might have any hint of someone who doesn't agree with you

And so in the end I find myself going to Twitter more than I'd like because people I want to see the content people I follow post there and I can't just create myself a safe garden of opinions I think are "objectively" wrong

That seems to be the case for social media in general. Reddit, Twitter, Lemmy, Mastodon... They all have the same political rage-bate content.

"Drives engagement". Making people angry at shit is a good way to get clicks, so ragebaiting makes up a large part of produced/posted/upvoted material.

(sorry, english is not my first language) what does it means "negatively politically oriented"?

If you want to keep up with trending topics, find news outlets you believe provide you the proper coverage of what you're after, and just follow the RSS feeds instead.

Mastodon/Lemmy/Reddit/Facebook/Twitter are there for people to post hot takes on the news, not just share the news. RSS is the way to go if the news is what you're after, and not people commenting on the news.

Their logo is a letter opener?

Try blocking individuals who are pushing negativity and sharing the good stuff. Be the change you want to see in the world.