I’ve been off and on with the Fediverse for sometime now. It’s a relatively friendly place full of fellow nerds, but with a few caveats…
My feeds seem very focused on hard information be it Gaza, tech companies doing bad things, or people pitchforking about the lastest big bad in digital privacy. This is all well and good, but it does get a bit tired after a while. Seeing the samey stuff post after post by academic types makes me more informed but also mentally draining.
Where’s the fun? On Facebook and Instagram I see light fluffy popcorn type posts of people reminiscing over Nintendo games or reels of cockatiels being cockatiels. It’s fun to scroll and interact. Here it feels like I’m in a classroom, and people, while friendly, do get quite hostile if you don’t like Linux or Star Trek.
As a leftist I like it here because it’s my bubble of people, but I’d like to see the fedi let its hair down a bit. It’s okay to talk about stuff other than infosec, privacy guides, distros, and Gaza.
I recommend some keyword filters. I use them to reduce certain topics from my feed, specifically about certain wars or politicians or celebrities. I did the same thing on reddit to filter out some of the “awareness” campaigns where everyone posted about the FCC chair to every single sub.
I also just browse local communities instead of the entire fediverse. This defeats the purpose of the fediverse, but it drastically reduces the number of duplicate and NSFW communities. I then mute the communities I don’t want to see. I’ll also mute the hyper specific communities that usually have complete overlap with the more general community, i.e. dogs and dogpictures.
It takes some work to get your feed to your liking, but it’s worth it in the end. There’s still far less content available than on reddit, but the amount of quality content feels similar.
You’re our hero!
How do you stay in a community, but filter content you don’t want through keywords?
Honestly I don’t even bother subscribing to comminuted. Communities for me are opt-out via muting rather than opt-in via subscriptions. I still see posts from the news community even though I have several Gaza keywords filtered out.