artair

If you're a macOS user, try Leomard. Leomard has a client-side option to screen out specific instances from your view.

https://lemmy.world/c/leomard@lemm.ee

In America, most political discourse has degenerated into "the [Republicans/Democrats] are destroying this country with their [fascist/pro-crime/capitalist/socialist/homophobic-transphobic/hyper-woke/etc.] behavior and if you don't vote for [insert person who's going to change exactly nothing], you can expect everything to fail!"

Some people call it "toxicity," and others call it "polarization." But the bottom line is: politics in America is all about doom, gloom, anger, and shouting right now. That's the "negative political orientation" folks are referencing.

This is also why some of us work so hard to keep politics out of our social media experience. It's not really improving anything, and it's bad for your mental health. There's enough awful stuff going on in the world as it stands. People can only process so much without going crazy.

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.

There's a feline race in the Star Trek universe called the Caitians. Their appearance varies WIDELY depending on whether they're live-action or animated.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Caitian

If one is Thunderbolt and another is AirPlay, it works. I have a 50" AirPlay-capable TV mounted in my office, and a 27" 4K display on my desk. I use a cable for the 27" and AirPlay for the 50".

Reasons I use my M1 MacBook Air:

1. Real estate. Thanks to AirPlay and the Thunderbolt port, I can have three desktops going at once with all my open windows.
2. Intel binaries still run on it via Rosetta 2.
3. Control -- I have more access to the OS, the command line, etc.
4. Virtualization -- Apple Silicon is built on ARM, so I can virtualize any ARM-based Linux distribution using VMware Fusion. (I run Fedora in a VM.)
5. Input -- despite iPads having the ability to accept keyboard and touchpad input these days, the pointer is still pretty clumsy.

And lots more, but that's a good start for me.

Right client, wrong operating system. It knows I'm using Leomard, but it thinks I'm on iOS. I suspect it doesn't handle architecture detection well on Apple Silicon machines.