I quite value content from targetted instances, but most of the “general” instances seem to be memes, posts on boosting lemmy, memes, reddit, memes bot posts, memes, reddit, memes, discussion on lemmy mobile applications, memes reddit, memes, and people talking about how the lemmy changed their lives oh and memes.
I would browse hot on reddit as a way to see things outside my subscribed bubble but I have given up. The signal to noise ratio is terrible.
Is anyone else experiencing this? How are you discovering magazines?
Definitely. I posted this yesterday in a similar thread about clickbait content:
This is one of the things that I’m struggling with right now as well. My reddit experience was heavily curated in favor of smaller subreddits, to the almost complete exclusion of top subreddits. The thing is, since Lemmy is so new, it hasn’t had the opportunity to build up a diverse array of specialized communities the same way. So basically right now all we have are mainly versions of the “big” Reddit communities, along with ones that decided to emigrate here from Reddit.
But it turns out, content from “big” communities is often the same low-effort, lowest-common denominator stuff regardless which platform is hosting it. Memes, clickbait, and ragebait permeate the top results, because well shucks, that’s what people want to see and engage with, apparently.
I’m hopeful that if/when Lemmy continues to grow, that it’ll become home to more active specialized communities. In the meanwhile, I’ve been trying to improve the experience as much as possible by A) trying to subscribe to more communities and B) slamming that block community button like I’m playing Hungry Hungry Hippos.
I think it boils down to the fact that a smaller userbase is going to naturally gravitate towards lowest common denominator content because there isn’t enough critical mass to form niche communities yet. It’s low-hanging fruit to post an angry meme about Reddit, since people being angry about Reddit is why Lemmy/kbin suddenly have so many people. But of those, how many want to talk about inflatable kayaks or vintage calculators?
As far as finding new communities, maybe this page will be helpful.
Yup. The niche restaurants and cool bookstores aren’t found in small towns. You gotta go where there are more people to find those. Online spaces are going to be similar.
There are still a ton of tiny niche message boards, but for new social media sites, the bigger, the better, sadly.
I’m not sure that small communities are doomed to have lower quality content, but it definitely requires more moderation to prevent spam.
People also need to be better conditioned. They treat content quantity as being more important than quality, which is essentially the opposite of what you want when it comes to high quality posting.
Absolutely. I really wish kbin had a local feed for magazines. I don’t like how it’s either “subscribed” or “all”, which includes every federated instance.
Umm, you can turn off federation and get a local feed with a single click/tap. On desktop, the switch is on the home page at the top of the right hand column. It looks like 3 dots connected in a triangle with curved lines.
On mobile I guess it is at the bottom.
They just have to rename/move the option to be more clear. For all visual issues Lemmy’s UI has, at least their local only filter mode is pretty clear to see and understand. Kbin’s “FEDERATION ON OR OFF” is so open to interpretation I thought for a while if it was a toggle so that things I posted only stayed local and didn’t federate
On the sidebar, if you click the fediverse icon (the 3 dots with lines between them), you can turn federation off. This will show you only local content. However, this does still show local kbin users posting to federated magazines, because technically they’re posting to the local copy on kbin and it just happens to get federated out on the backend. But it should reduce the amount of completely federated things you see
It’s the same for me. I’ve seen a few mentions of the feeds containing too much porn but I’ve not seen a single porn community/magazine or post, personally. I even checked my settings last time I saw it mentioned and I’ve not got anything set that should disable it (and I’ve seen one or two posts marked as “+18” so I know they can show in my feed).
It’s not like I’m desperate to have porn in my feed - I’d rather keep my general browsing and porn separate, in fact - but I do find it odd that it doesn’t show for me at all while other people are complaining about how common it is.
I feel it’s mostly politics, which I really was not looking forward to - getting away from the fever pitch, very angry American politics constantly flooding Reddit was a welcome break for like five whole minutes, there.
I try to block most obvious political shit, it just doesn’t help because there’s dozens and dozens of subs shovelling it out on the “front page”.
Yeah I know what you mean. I mostly browse just “subscribed”. But i sometimes browse all and what I do is block communities that are full of “noise” or are irrelevant to me. The result is a feed that has mostly interesting things for me to discover.