I hope this is a good place for this. A few weeks ago I started a simple experiment: Block every community in the All feed that is about the US election in some way.

I thought this up after a thread about the Biden debate, as someone kindly (not really kindly) informed me that I should curate my own experience here. I thought about it and realized just how much election/politics stuff there is on the front page. It was quite hard blocking communities I like, especially 196 on blahaj.

Now the quality of my feed did go up in some ways but it’s very slow. I also realized that I am feeling a lot less rage/anger than before when scrolling lemmy. I didn’t even realize how much the constant political stuff from another continent affected me…

What is your opinion on this? Is Lemmy really filled with too much US political rage bait? Should I continue with my zero tolerance policy?

It would also interest me to hear an American perspective. Is there more or less politics here, on other platforms or real life. How does rage/hate affect you when scrolling through Lemmy and does it take a toll?

  • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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    5 months ago

    I took a two week break from Lemmy and other engagement sources and it did wonders for my mental health. I’d recommend trying something similar.

    • blackbelt352@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      For me, even just making the switch from Reddit to Lemmy has done quite a lot for mental health and really helped reshape my social media diet into something much better.

      On Lemmy I encounter a lot fewer true assholes on the platform (theres still snark and sarcasm and inside jokes, but I liked that aspect of reddit), it’s a lot slower of stream of content, the posts take longer to change so I don’t get stuck in an infinite scroll of perpetually new content, and I’ve rebalanced where I’m spending my time online, more informational and wholesome side of youtube and a discord community that I found that I really like.

      But yeah even taking a break from these every so often is still a good idea.