I’m wondering: do people just like memes or are they being forced to use them to talk about relevant topics?
Wouldn’t it be better to have more serious threads and less memes that hint at political/news arguments?
I’m wondering: do people just like memes or are they being forced to use them to talk about relevant topics?
Wouldn’t it be better to have more serious threads and less memes that hint at political/news arguments?
It’s easier to create a meme than it is many other sorts of content.
The All feed will reflect what people want to post, as it all shows up there (well, all the stuff in communities that at least one user on your home instance subscribes to).
That’s why I’m saying that you’re probably going to be happier whitelisting the content that you are interested in, rather than complaining that people on the Threadiverse as a whole aren’t posting what you want. There are many different takes on what people want to see, so no one person is going to be happy with traffic as an aggregate. There are a bunch of furries here, who are happy with furry content. One of the first threads I ran into when I first joined — Kbin sent people to random posts to try to help them discover new communities — was a post talking about technology issues. Another user there, who also appeared to be a new user sent there randomly by Kbin, was upset that there was so many furries there and complaining about the fact. It was in a community on pawb.social, which is a furry instance. There’s no reasonable way to make the guy who didn’t want to see furry content and the people who do want to see furry content simultaneously happy with any one single collection of content. Gotta produce user-specific feeds for that.
EDIT: There are also some people who prefer to blacklist rather than whitelist. Like, browse All, but then just keep blocking every community that they don’t want to see. I think that this doesn’t scale well — I mean, there are tens of thousands of communities out there. Some people can create shit-tons of communities, and I suspect that sooner or later someone is very probably going to set up an instance that has auto-generated communities for one reason or another. Maybe to mirror RSS feeds somewhere or something, who knows. There’s already one that mirrors Reddit subreddits, lemmit.online. Then it’s going to flood the feeds of the blacklisters. But, well, that’s another way to curate content.
Usually people do that in the same instance, so you just block the instance.
All frontpage is filled with memes and shitpost, again are you saying that this is what most people want to see?
I mean, I don’t know how I can be clearer than I was in the above comment:
It will have everything that people are posting on any communities that any single user on your home instance subscribes to. This means that the proportion of traffic on All will generally reflect what people want to post.
There are some social media websites that try to profile you based on your viewing or commenting habits or other such things and then do recommendations of content. Some of these, like Twitter, have caught flak for recommending content that someone is likely to engage with, which causes them to tend to recommend ragebait material.
But regardless of the merits of one recommendation system or another, mander.xyz is running Lemmy. Lemmy doesn’t, in 2026, have some sort of system to profile you, try to predict what posts you want to see, and then show you only that. Maybe it should and someone should write that, but today, it gives you three choices:
You can view All, which is all of the posts in any community that anyone on your home instance has subscribed to.
You can view Local, which is all of the posts in communities on your home instance alone. Unless you are only interested in using the Threadiverse for highly-specialized content and on a home instance dedicated to that content, this probably isn’t what you want.
You can view Subscribed, which is all of the posts in any community that you personally have subscribed to.
What I’m saying is that it is very likely that the third option is going to very probably provide you with a higher proportion of content that you want to see. “All” will probably never reflect what you in particular are most-interested in. It’s maybe a way to help expose new users to a sampling of what’s out there, reduce the barrier to start them using the Threadiverse, but you’re probably going to want a Subscribed list tailored to your interests.
But what I can say with utter certainty is that people who are posting memes will not stop posting memes because you don’t want to see as many memes in your feed, and All is going to reflect what people post. Getting upset about what people are posting and then complaining about that won’t solve your problem. Writing a recommendation system to profile users and provide recommended feeds for Threadiverse servers might, if you can code, but I’m guessing that the most-practical solution is going to be just doing a set of communities tailored to your interests, and then browsing Subscribed.
I asked a simple question and you are bringing in twitter and other stuff.
Heh. So, there’s this Saturday Night Live skit from 1997:
https://youtu.be/OMNaTApbo8E?t=130
Harry Caray: “Hey, if you were a hotdog, and you were starving, would you eat yourself?”
Host: “What?”
Harry Caray: “I know I would. First I’d smother myself in brown mustard and relish. I’d be so delicious. So would you?”
Host: “I don’t know.”
Harry Caray: “Don’t jerk me around, Norm. It’s a simple question. A baby could answer it. If you were a hotdog and you were starving, would you eat yourself?”
He gave an elaborate yes. Yes, memes are frontpage because that’s what is up voted. People like pics. Even in comments, I find my replies that include a photo get far more up votes than text alone.
Translation: Please confirm my existing views in a manner I can comprehend. I haven’t the capacity to utilize nuanced helpful answers. Thank you.
Yeah maybe. If you don’t want to see them just block them. Easy. Complaining about the frontpage here never change anything.