I wanted to get an outside perspective on my Lemmy experience, so I go on /r/redditalternatives and bring up my experiences that I’ve described elsewhere here (tl;dr Lemmy communities are either filled with non sequitur ragebait or completely empty).
I get plenty of responses echoing my sentiment and offering suggestions like blocking and filtering. Plenty of others pointing out how Reddit sucks in its own way and how Lemmy addresses those issues (no creepy AI bots pretending to be real people). I feel my OP and the ongoing discussion is constructive and in good faith, and most people myself included express a desire to see Lemmy and the fediverse succeed despite our frustrations. But oops out of nowhere I get muted and banned with no explanation.
Fun times.
Reddit’s community, as in the whole, feels like it plays by some unwritten rules where straying just a bit from those causes maximum persecution. And though I understand each platform has a culture, including here on the fediverse, Reddit’s I don’t feel like culture either.
About adressing your fediverse concerns, I second the idea of curating your experience by blocking, subscribing, and manually looking the community list as needed. Furthermore, I’d also suggest keeping an eye on where the posts that cause you to be annoyed come from, since those not uncommonly come from the same places.
I just noticed that Lemmy defaults to showing you a feed of all local communities when you open the homepage instead of subscriptions. There doesn’t seem to be a way to change that. I’m bombarded with the ragebait and doomerism that suffuses typical Lemmy discourse as soon as I open the homepage, and I have to click a button to tell the server “now show me what I actually want to see”.
Yes I know you can block communities, but maintaining a list of blocked instances, comms, and users feels like playing a game of whack-a-mole. If people here were more chill I might feel differently, but the rage shows up in the weirdest places you’d never expect, and not even in an organic way.
It’s such a tiny change, but I think defaulting to showing a user’s subscriptions rather than the local feed, only falling back to local if the user isn’t signed in or if the user has no subscriptions, would make a huge difference.