So I’ve been attempting to block communities I don’t want to see on my main feed, but it’s pretty much impossible to do these days because the communities get mirrored on so many different instances that when you block one single community 5 times, there are still 3 more versions on different instances with the exact same crap. Block them? There’s still more!
This site is rapidly becoming completely useless, the way I’ve been using it before.
Keep at it, if curating All is what you want. That’s how I use this site too, and so far I’ve blocked over 900 communities - it has made All SO MUCH better.
You’ll burn through the redundant communities.
Just don’t try to do it all in one go - hit a few on each scroll and it’ll add up without being a very noticeable effort.
I wish there were giant lists of related communities and an easy way to import them as blocks. Want to block all sports team communities? Here are all 1,000 of them. All the anime communities? Here are all 90,000,000 of them.
Community tags would enable that. Vice versa, it’d make those kinds of groupings easy to find and subscribe to for those interested.
I wish my Internet was fast enough to block that many communities. These days I usually get frustrated after waiting for 3-4 of the same communities I’ve already blocked 20 time to load, just so I can block them again, and give up on using lemmy.
Internet speed shouldn’t make that big a difference in a site like Lemmy. If you’re on mobile, consider trying an app (or a different app if you’re already using one). If PC, maybe a different browser? I use Firefox, at about 50 mbps according to https://www.speedtest.net/ - lemmy loads up nearly instantly.
Another option is to use filters instead of blocks. I don’t know of a way to do it on PC, but many mobile apps support filters. You’ll have to find the right balance of being broad enough to zap all the redundant communities, but specific enough to not zap the unrelated ones that you might be interested in seeing. IMO that’s more effort than just blocking, but if internet speed is a barrier, that would make for a good plan B.
Yeah, well, not everyone lives in an ideal situation. Fuck me, right?
If you’re not able to try different apps, browsers, or filters, you do appear to be fucked.
I run it on PC through a mobile hotspot. For whatever reason lemmy seems to be the only site that regularly chugs like that for me. And yes, the fact I appear to be fucked is the point of this post, to inform anyone who cares of a rare use case which makes the site very difficult to use recently. If they don’t prioritize fixing it, or if it’s somehow prohibitively difficult that’s just fine, I’m not entitled to a working site, especially with my unique situation, but I wanted to report the emerging problem. If it keeps going like this how long will it be before people with perfectly fine connections simply don’t have the time to block enough communities to actually get rid of them (some guy said he had to block ~900 communities to get to where he wanted).
I tend to stick to the Subscribed feed nowadays, with !communitypromo@lemmy.ca to see new or reactivated communities
edit: piefed has keyword filters https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list
Right, except pretty much the only thing I actually like about social media is using it to explore previously undiscovered things. Sticking exclusively to a few subscribed communities has no appeal at all to me.
Then the only option is probably to block all the communities you dislike
Alternatively, you can ask on !communitypromo@lemmy.ca what communities people have discovered recently (I think I’ll just make that post now)
Then the only option is probably to block all the communities you dislike
…which isn’t even really possible anymore, which is the whole point of this post.
You mentioned 8 versions of a community in the OP. If you block all of them, you should be good until a new one appears.
That’s going to be time consuming, but there isn’t any better option at the moment
It’s not just time consuming. It takes up all of the time I spend here and still doesn’t actually progress to anything better.
I’m not saying it’s hard, I’m saying it’s become impossible recently. My block list is absolutely enormous these days, and there’s no end in sight.
Piefed allows you to block keywords, maybe that can help?
You can import your settings from Lemmy
I’ve been using keyword blocking in uBlock Origin to clean up my all feed.
To do so, open up the uBlock Origin dashboard, go to the ‘My filters’ tab, and add this filter:
lemmy.world##article.row:has-text(/word1|word2|word3|word4/i)
For example:
lemmy.world##article.row:has-text(/Trump|Elon|Musk|nazi/i)
edit lemmy.world to whatever your instance is, and the keywords to whatever stuff you don’t want to see.
Blocking specific words tends to have unintended consequences, blocking lots of things that haven’t even been considered. It’s the communities themselves that I don’t want, like all the hyper-negative communities which are super popular, not just specific trigger words.
Devs could add a “annoyingcommunity@*” filter. Shouldn’t be hard.
I’m not sure what you mean. It takes some effort but yes it definitely works. I’ve probably blocked 50 communities, “mirrors” or whatever, and I don’t see them anymore. 196 is the only one I had to block repeatedly due to “mirroring”.
I’m still new to Lemmy, but I’m not understanding the point of a community mirroring on different instances. If you’re on one instance, like sh.itjust.works, I thought it’d be discoverable on all the other Lemmy instances. I would never see a point in creating multiple instances of the same community if one of mine were discoverable by All.
Sometimes it’s just historical
!android@lemdro.id and !android@lemmy.world have been coexisting for years.
I’ve reached out to the mods of the LW one a few times, they were not interested in consolidating.
To get around people blocking them.
People block communities because the mods will shadowban them from the entire instance.
Well, if you block one instance itself in entirety, you can still access some of the communities on other instances, so there is a fairly useful purpose there for some people. Also, the comment sections can take a different tone depending on the community which uses that instance.
