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.
I’ve seen posts praising free school lunch getting passed by a few states.
It gets a lot more bearable once you setup a Politics filter that blocks dozens & dozens & dozens of keywords (mine is up to 66 words so far)…
This is perfect. My current list just contains 10 different ways to block posts about covid.
You have a word list I could borrow?
Here’s what I’m rolling with right now… I try to nuke everything even vaguely political…
GOP Trump Biden conservatives elections voter fraud senate senator house of representatives whitehouse reproductive rights pro-life pro-choice 2nd amendment gun control Marxist MAGA Pelosi climate change Parliament koch murdoch desantis politician fascist Rudy leftis liberal antisem right wing supremac on strike hateful elect liberals republicans democrats republican democrat congress abortion communist socialism socialist capitalism capitalist fascism vax global warming ukrain covid proud boy cops police defund minimum wage billionaire the government injustice human rights climate crisis democracy private healthcare public healthcare labor contract on strikeI fucking love you. Seriously thanks.
Lobotomizing yourself is faster.
Glad to hear it from someone with experience!
Nah, I’m not brainwashed into thinking that politics is intrinsically evil.
Nah, you can’t aim the icepick properly yourself. Believe me, I’ve tried.
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.
Most of what’s happening in politics is bad
You’re not wrong.
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”
Check our Nostr, yeah it has a politicial bias but its not prone to censorship unlike mastodon and twitter.
Eh. Was checking out Nostr a few days ago because it sounded interesting, but it’s just full of cryptobros.
It is full of bitcoin maxies. It needs more people that are not crypto people on there.
The problem is that cryptobros are the kinds of people that drive away non-cryptobros. If you go to a site as a normal person and see nothing but cryptobros, you’re not going to have an incentive to stick around, now, are you?
Someone got to break the ice. Lemmy used to be very tech savvy, still us but now there are other topics to discuss. You gotta get on there and post into the void, get the ball rolling.
Lemmy used to be very tech savvy, but not repulsive. Cryptobros are repulsive (and not just because of the cryptocurrency shilling!). What’s my incentive to stick around?
Like I said, someone got to break the ice. You don’t want to do that and that is fine and I get it.
People need to join and create their little own corners on Nostr were you discuss other topics and maybe a rule in these corners will be no crypto shilling and not be repulsive. Eventually these corners will grow in size to were Nostr is not just crypto bros.
Or, far more likely, Nostr will remain a place for cryptobros. And that’s fine. Keeps them out of my spaces.
It’s easier to bitch about what’s wrong than to actively do something to make it better.
Because it’s one or the other. This dichotomy isn’t even slightly false.
Well said, unfortunate reality.
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.
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.
That sounds a lot like twitter
I guess that is what happens with a Twitter replacement, still the same Twitter community.
at least on here, if you notice they’re all coming to the same instance, you can just block the instance. assuming they’re not on large one
“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.
This is one of the reasons why I think votes and other such nonsense are a detriment to sites like this. (It’s also why I’ve eliminated them from my Lemmy experience.)
The thing is that love and passion also drive engagement. Tech and news companies could have created algos to push content that makes people happy, but they chose not to. Imagine how different life and the internet would be had they chosen the friendlier option.
There is no algorithm. Clicks don’t do shit on mastodon.
That seems to be the case for social media in general. Reddit, Twitter, Lemmy, Mastodon… They all have the same political rage-bate content.
(sorry, english is not my first language) what does it means “negatively politically oriented”?
Complaining about politics, essentially.
deleted by creator
politically oriented = the post is related to politics
negatively oriented = the post contains negative emotions, eg. they are complaining about somethingImagine you have two friends talking about politics. One of them always says bad things about politicians and thinks everything is going wrong. They focus on problems and criticisms related to politics.
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.
RSS doesn’t have trending or any sort of curation though, the news sources usually have 10 garbage click bait articles for any one that you might be interested in. I haven’t found a way to make it work as a reliable way for trending news, yet at least.
Fair point. Appreciate your perspective.
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.
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.
