It seems anytime I try to check out Mastodon it is always some negative political view or affiliation of why X, Y & Z is bad. Is this just what most people like boosting or is it a sign of botting to push negativity over the more positive headlines?
I do understand I can switch to any Mastodon instance I want and stick to a small community, however I like keeping up with trending topics in the world. Maybe the most popular accounts in the Mastodon community likes to rise up pitchforks every minute.
Most of what’s happening in politics is bad
You’re not wrong.
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.
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That sounds a lot like twitter
I guess that is what happens with a Twitter replacement, still the same Twitter community.
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“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 don’t know. I picked some hashtags to follow, and now my feed is full of cats.
Mine is all amiga and Commodore 64 games. Not the exact scenario I was expecting when following #retrogaming
Yeah, not what I’d expect either. The lack of an algorithm is one of the things I’m not crazy about on there. It took me months to get into Mastodon at first because I got tired of the complaints about Elon. I only know one person on the platform too. But I do like the cat pictures.
Wait, what did you expect when you followed #retrogaming?
I expected more console games that 80s computers, not that I’m complaining. Just not a world I was familiar with
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You have a word list I could borrow?
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I fucking love you. Seriously thanks.
This is perfect. My current list just contains 10 different ways to block posts about covid.
Lobotomizing yourself is faster.
Nah, you can’t aim the icepick properly yourself. Believe me, I’ve tried.
Glad to hear it from someone with experience!
Nah, I’m not brainwashed into thinking that politics is intrinsically evil.
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.
Same, digitalart and also pixelart fill a lot of my timeline.
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!
By “not a total shitshow” do you mean that it actually contained unpopular opinions or do you mean it was not filled with extremists.
Actual unpopular (but not extremist) opinions.
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.
RSS has been the best way to get your news for like 20 years, but most web browser have built-in RSS feeders these days, plus there’s always just plain old bookmarks
It’s easier to bitch about what’s wrong than to actively do something to make it better.
I mean plenty of people bitching are doing what’s within their power. This is a reductionist and bad faith argument
Everyone has the ability to change the things around them. People want to change the world. That is an unrealistic goal to start with. What you can change directly and immediately is your family/household. Then you can move to your neighborhood. As you change the things closest to you, then you can slowly move out to larger things.
Going on a worldwide platform and bitching may make you feel better, but it does nothing to change things and just makes people avoid you.
So every single action you ever take is to affect change directly? Seems that you’re not affecting change by posting here. Sounds like you’re bitching about people bitching. That does nothing. Kinda makes me wanna avoid you.
Let people bitch. It’s not hurting you in any way, and might even raise awareness of issues to people who aren’t familiar with a particular issue.
Because it’s one or the other. This dichotomy isn’t even slightly false.
Well said, unfortunate reality.
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.
That’s why I’m always arguing for higher taxes. I feel like not enough people are in favor of higher taxes.
I’m with you. Zero taxes on the bottom 50%. Progressively higher taxes as you go up that scale until you crack 100% for the tippy-top.
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.
That was my strategy too: follow hashtags of interest, and as I identify users who consistently say interesting things, follow them as well. Occasionally poke into “Local” and ferret out one or two more interesting users (and a whole bunch of users to block!). Oh, and make VERY heavy use of filters: filtering on hashtags, chiefly, but also key words that tend to get associated with asshats.
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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.
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”
