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 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
This is also why I stopped going to Mastodon. In addition to negative ragebait politics being almost the only thing that’s trending (and I have too much of that in my life already) there’s no real nuance or tolerance for anything outside the echo chamber.
You DO get called a racist nazi transphobe for stepping outside the box or trying to support people, ideas or places that might not be 100% perfect or pass the strictest ideological purity test. I thought Liberal Twitter was pretty exclusionary and echo-chamber-y, but Mastodon’s a lot worse.
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
ragebait gets clicks. just look at twitter, what got the most engagement was ragebait meant to make you mad, which for the most part works
“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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Most of what’s happening in politics is bad
You’re not wrong.
Their logo is a letter opener?
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.
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)…
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.
This is perfect. My current list just contains 10 different ways to block posts about covid.
You have a word list I could borrow?
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.
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.
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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Same. I stay away from #Explore and just keep to my feed of people I actually follow. And I make sure to unfollow those who are too stressful to hear from constantly.
I agree with almost all the of all politics all the time people who constantly post negative things, but it’s too tiring to read them, especially since knowing about it does me no good and I can’t do anything about it anyway. I already vote and donate as much as I can, and I live in a Blue state so anything outside of my area’s just not possible for me to influence.
I’ve found it’s better just to ignore it and focus on positive things that make my life better.
It’s the worst part of social media, in my opinion. If you’re ingesting that stuff 24/7, you’d think the world was ending every week.
We aren’t built to process that volume of information without it warping our perception.
It’s why I’ve gone back to reading an old school newspaper. The format naturally limits the amount of bad news they can fit in a day, and it has regular sections on art, culture, philosophy, nature etc.
