In your Lemmy account settings, set your default feed to 'subscribed' instead of 'all'.

When you open the app or log in on your browser you will only see communities you've subscribed to.

It will greatly improve your (and everyone else's) experience if you subscribe to positive communties and participate in them.

Have you considered halting the decline of democracy? Then people won't post depressing facts.

Or you filter by keywords. One of the two things needs to happen for you not to be exposed to negativity.

Step 1: don't browse the All feed. I dunno how Reddit was okay for you, visiting r/all was always full of Trump this Trump that every 5 minutes.

You are 100% correct, negative news has a greater impact on people than positive: https://assets.csom.umn.edu/assets/71516.pdf

Media sites know this, and use it to drive engagement:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01538-4 https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/social-media-facebook-twitter-politics-b1870628.html

And so, negative headlines are getting worse: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0276367

But negative news is addictive and psychologically damaging: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/why-we-worry/202009/the-psychological-impact-negative-news

So it's important to try and stay positive:

https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/benefits-of-good-news

If you want a break from the constant negativity, here are some sites that report specifically on positive news:

• https://www.goodgoodgood.co/
• https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/
• https://fixthenews.com/
• https://positivenewsfoundation.org/
• https://www.onlygoodnewsdaily.com/

And here's 35 more: https://news.feedspot.com/good_news_websites/

Some communities on Lemmy you might be interested in:

• !goodnews@kbin.social
• !lemmybewholesome@lemmy.world
• !goodnewseveryone@sh.itjust.works
• !upliftingnews@lemmy.world
• https://lemmy.world/c/hopeposting
• https://lemmy.world/c/worldinprogress
• https://lemmy.world/c/climatehope

Remember, realistic optimism is important and, unlike what some might have you believe, is not the same as blissful ignorance or 'burying your head in the sand': https://www.learning-mind.com/realistic-optimism-blind-positivity/

https://www.centreforoptimism.com/realisticoptimism

And doesn't mean you must stay uninformed on current affairs: https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/how-to-stop-doom-scrolling

https://goodable.co/blog/tips-for-balancing-positive-and-negative-news/

Block Lemmy.ml, hexbear, and dbzer0, then make your own list of keywords to block (Trump, Elon, murder, angry, etc etc)

Same as reddit: Subscribe to communities you like then only look at those.

Why don’t you just keep away from c/all and stick to your subscribed communities?

To discover new communities, I suggest subscribing to c/newcommunities

I use Sync and it lets me block keywords like Trump,Elon,Musk. It doesn't catch everything but does a good amount.

i blocked every single news and politics communities, as well as all the "*** infuriating" ones, it has drastically improved the content of my timeline :)

Add a filter for anything political that comes to mind, subscribe to fun instances (history memes, anime, shitposting)

Yeah lemmy has bit too much political content. Americans seem very obsessed with it. I just kept blocking all of them and now my feed is pretty free of political nonsense. If I want that kind of content i'll just read the news paper or go to my news feed of choice

Does anyone else feel this way about their Lemmy experience?

Yes. I usually stick to fandom communities where I post some cool fanart and chat about latest books I have read. I avoid all feed at all cost.

I hoped that !hopeposting@lemmy.world would be the same as r/hopeposting@reddit.com but the comments are night and day in there. I still repost stuff but a drive to make OC memes is just not there.

I usually hang out in !anime@ani.social, !lightnovels@ani.social and !hermitcraft@lemmy.world

P.S. Also my polish instance szmer.info doesn't have as bad ALL feed as the lemmy.world due to people that don't care about US politics and not subscribing to those communities.

I'm trying to move my news off social media and on to RSS. I set up an RSS reader with a handful of trusted and varied news sources (some mainstream, some independent, some local, some foreign) and now I'm starting to filter out news from Lemmy and other social networks.

Some things I quickly noticed is that not having a comments section is actually great, I can jump straight to or past subjects I'm not in the mood for, and there's no endless scroll but if I feel there's too little I can add more sources and if there's too much I can take some out. I still also use Lemmy so if I find an interesting new blog or website, I can add it to my RSS reader to keep following it instead of relying on strangers posting new content and it getting voted up. This lets me focus more on the smaller special interest groups that social media is actually good for.

I use voyager and block words phrases and instances that bring that stuff up. And sometimes users who repeatedly do it too.

I'm also on Lemmy blahaj which don't know if that matters. But over time I rarely have a lot of depressing political things in my feed anymore. Just every so often.

I have another account on Lemmy world for political things already I rarely use it.

I think places like Lemmy are better suited for discussions and ofc ongoing events and politics are a huge part of that.

Have you tried 9gag and other more "lightweight" and meme oriented platforms?

Does anyone else feel this way about their Lemmy experience?

The out of the box experience is not great (neither is Reddit, if you're asking me, it's at least as depressing to see the amount of trash/low effort posts on their home page). But once I switched to 'Subscribed' only view, things were already much better since I was only seeing content I was interested in (aka no politics or drama of any sort).

As already suggested: !newcommunities@lemmy.world is good place to see what's new, also there is !communitypromo@lemmy.ca

Most importantly, Lemmy is not Reddit for many reasons but this one is more directly related to your question: it's much smaller (to give you an idea, I moderate a journaling community we recently reached... 300 members (of which less than a handful is active), whereas the Reddit journaling community is 2 Million+ ;). So, there is a lot less content posted on Lemmy. Back on Reddit, I was mostly a commenter (barely posting anything new myself) but I quickly realized that if I wanted to see stuff I was interested in on Lemmy I better start... posting myself ;)

I've taken a bit of a different approach. I've been using a keyword filter to remove posts that contain any words I don't care to read about. So no posts about trump, Elon, RFK, cyber trucks, etc.

I am not here to get that kind of news, I do that separately with the news sources I can trust and verify. Otherwise any tabloid or sensational opinion piece can potentially try to ruin my day all in the name of getting clicks

Pornography is never bad news. Normalize more pornography in your life

This is why Lemmy will never become popular with the mainstream untill these people get their shit together. No sane person wants to browse a feed like mine despite the great lenghts I go attempting to block all politics and rage bait. I can only imagine how bad it is for someone just following the most popular communities and expecting a feed similar to that of Reddit.

If you don't want to leave then I think the second best option is to keep calling out these users poisoning the platform. Just be aware that there is going to be a lot hate coming your way then. This place is filled to the brim with extremists.

Use an alternative front-end like Tesseract to filter out specific words on desktop. For mobile, you can use e.g. Voyager or Interstellar to filter out specific words. Unfollow news and politics communities.

Come and join us on !casualuk@feddit.uk. We provide bottom quality banter there.

Edit to add:

Also, sub to: !cooking_with_fire@feddit.uk, !dadjokes@lemmy.world, !stick@sh.itjust.works, and !youcantparktheremate@feddit.uk. Anytime lemmy is getting you down, just peruse any of these for some politics-free, stress-free content.

20 active communities which are not politics, news, memes or tech

https://lemmyverse.link/feddit.org/post/6554534

!newcommunities@lemmy.world

I mainly browse through home page subscriptions. Occasionally I venture to all to find new subs, but I have a lot of subs blocked and keywords blocked for when I do.

!wizards@lemmy.world

Did you subscribe to news and politics communities? I'd recommend to unsubscribe, then. The more you tailor your feed to your interests, the more you're going to get what you're looking for.

Yes, gtfo out of Lemmy. It's Twitter but for leftists.

If you're into crosswords and word games, there are !crossword@lemmy.world, !nytconnections@lemmy.world, !dailygames@lemmy.zip