Is it possible to block communities by name? Or is there any workaround to do so?
Specifically I am not interested in .*Moe posts. So whenever a “SomethingMoe” pops up in my feed, I block that community. However, unlike most other communities, they seem to have a never ending source of permutations of their names. This can get very tiring, as blocking them makes the general feed contain less, but never any of these posts.
I guess I could write a script, which blocks any community with the regex /.*[Mm]oe.*/gm and run it periodically. But I am a lazy bugger and neither want to write the script nor run it semi-periodically.
In general, I’d suggest browsing by “Subscribed” rather than “All”.
First, “All” doesn’t actually show you everything out there, because your home instance doesn’t know about everything out there. It only shows you communities that at least one user on your home instance (lemmy.cafe, for you) has subscribed to. You’re seeing content from communities on “.moe” TLD instances because at least one user on your home instance is subscribing to those communities. On very large Threadiverse instances, like maybe lemmy.world, with many users, this is closer to seeing everything, since odds are better that someone on your home instance has subscribed to it. But it’s not everything.
But secondly, I’ve seen a number of posts from people who invariably don’t like one type of content or another — yours isn’t one, to be fair — complaining that lemmy defaults should exclude X from the All feed, for some X, because they don’t like X and find it difficult to exclude X. And the problem is that there’s no global X that fits everyone.
The Internet as a whole is a firehose, and invariably, there’s stuff out there that people aren’t going to want to see, and people who are going to create communities that someone doesn’t like. Might be spam or just noise, might be test material, you name it.
If you really want to see everything out there, you’re probably going to want a script anyway. You’re probably going to want to pull down https://lemmyverse.net/communities or something similar — they spider the Threadiverse, and do actually build a list of all communities out there — which actually does list everything out there, then filter by whatever criteria you want, then subscribe to everything left.
EDIT:
Sounds like, from the other comment, that it’s not “.moe” TLD instances that you’re thinking of, but rather communities that end in “moe”. Though in general, if the objection is to sexed-up young anime girls, I expect that it’s most-likely inclusive of both.
I disagree. I exclusively browse /all and not subs for discovery of new communities. I would miss out on so much if I never used all. How else do you even find a community to sub to? I just manually block anything I dislike. I think it’s a better system than subs, personally.
Hit lemmyverse.net, or check and see what people you talk to and find interesting are commenting in. Every subscription to a remote community had to start with at least one user on your home instance doing that.
There’s also [email protected] and [email protected] (the latter specifically for those communities just starting out) that will have a list of communities actively seeking new users.
I also try to recommend communities that I’ve found interesting when they’re relevant and come up in my comments with the
!communityname@instancesyntax. Lile, the other day someone posted a question about dice on [email protected], and I mentioned [email protected], which is devoted to people making dice (and has pretty pictures of them). That last one obviously relies on people actually sticking those recommendations in their comments though!I like the “All” feed, as it allows some new content. My Subscriptions are somewhat smallish and mostly used for focused reading. I am just used to get rid of a certain topic with maybe up to 3 blocks (I don’t think there are many communities, which distribute over more than that many instances).
You are absolutely right, trying to tell people what to post and consume online is an absolutely absurd idea. the trick is to figure out how to find your couple of topics.
My current way of getting rid of unwanted topics is for sure not ideal. But most of the time it works just fine, when browsing randomly. Maybe i will get bored at some time and actually write a script. Thanks for the hint with https://lemmyverse.net/communities ! Hopefully i will remember to post the script here (if I ever get around to it) so others could profit from it. It seems like there might be a tiny audience for that :-)
Long run, my thinking is that the best approach is to have something like “user curation lists” and let other users subscribe to them. Could be posts, users, communities or whatever. Then you find something that approximates your preferences, subscribe to “Bob’s community whitelist” and/or “Jim’s community blacklist”, and that reduces some of the human-time load to try to identify interesting content. My understanding is that BlueSky has something vaguely along these lines.
But I think that there are probably more-immediate problems on the Lemmy/PieFed/Mbin developer plates right now, like dealing with the scraper-bots that are severely loading all of the instances that permit anonymous access.
That would be a great feature. I highly dislike the algorithm YouTube & co serve - as it is designed like a tar pit, just to keep you scrolling.
But a Human curated list is basically like getting recommendations from a colleague.