My advice: learn to read German
this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
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Relaxed section for discussion and debate that doesn't fit anywhere else. Whether it's advice, how your week is going, a link that's at the back of your mind, or something like that, it can likely go here.
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Always has been, e.g. forums from last century like slashdot.org is US centric since 25+ years even if it's open to the world, like usenet was. Every forum using english language have a majority of users from the US, talking about US "celebrities" and US politics.
I use filters on Lemmy and Mastadon to remove content I'm not interested in. You'll want to keep updating these. Trust me within a few weeks you won't have to anymore.
They actually happen to be exclusively US based topics. Politics seems to be like a popular sport over there, but it's super boring with just two parties. Then you have famous people who just don't interest me. These topics just don't add anything, are repetitive, and a waste of valuable real estate 🧠
The communities and people you follow obviously matter a lot too, but at least this will clean up your All or Exploration tabs.
Oh, and, I also ban/mute people who are overly political or just straight up annoy me. It's not like they're ever going to share anything I want to know about.
Oh, and, in case you didn't know, you can also use adblockers, including ones that cover your entire home network. I honestly don't mind a good ad once in a while if it makes my life better, by but the last ad I saw contained a guy who was peeing and it was for bottled water, eventhough there's nothing wrong with tap water where I live.
Apart from filters (to exclude content you don't want to see), how did you curate your feed? was it entirely from All and Local?
I stay in subscribed and all, I still have to try local some time.
Which instances did you try? I want to check if it was the background radiation of USpol inherent to most online communities you're sick of (which there really isn't a solution beyond keeping up with the newest buzzwords to add to your filters for from what I can tell) or the dot-social/kolektiva/twitter-like "my political happenings are too important for a content warning and must be boosted to everyone's eyes 24/7" variety of USpol (which there is a ton of in Lemmy as well but i don't think most people are ready for that debate yet)
The second one can be ameliorated a little by picking a smaller, sillier instance (hint: the weirder the domain, the better) and not following The Same Large Accounts Everyone Does.
In fact, I would advise against Mastodon the software altogether and instead point you towards instances of Akkoma or one of the not-Japanese Misskey forks such as Sharkey, Firefish, or Iceshrimp. The vibes of most instances I've seen seem to be cozier, and the Bubble timeline (called Recommended Timeline by some software) helps with discovering people to follow beyond the said Large Accounts.
You can look at https://joinmastodon.org/servers and then Region and see which servers are interesting for you. Besides that if you follow a lot of persons which use your language and have similar interests your local timeline can be better for you. And you can follow hashtags like for example #gardening #flowers #birds
Apart from this, the Explore option on Mastodon, no matter which servers I've tried very often is full of US content, but there's no need to use the Explore when your local timeline is interesting.
Issue is when I follow people, my timeline reaches the post I read in a previous moment, and then I go to local timeline, the whole server timeline, and then the issue appears, in the same way I subscribe to lemmy communities, i read everything and then go to local or global timelines.
Following hashtags is good, but it doesn't solve that issue when people don't use them. Even filtering words doesn't work well because there are generic terms that can be used generically or in a US-focused topic.