I’m wondering: do people just like memes or are they being forced to use them to talk about relevant topics?
Wouldn’t it be better to have more serious threads and less memes that hint at political/news arguments?
Memes are my love language.
I don’t like anime, I don’t demand that the endless anime pages close so I don’t have to see them on all, I just make good use of the block button.
I block anime subs. I block furry subs. I think they should exist. I just don’t need them. Let people enjoy things, it doesn’t mean you have to.
Probably because they’re easy to make, so there’s a lot of traffic there.
I think the real question is “why does the content I see not reflect what I want to see”, and I’d guess that that’s most-likely because you’re browsing “All”, which combines all traffic from all communities on any instances that anyone on your home instance, mander.xyz, subscribes to. This is, for any given person, unlikely to be specifically what they are interested in.
I’d generally suggest finding a list of communities that you are interested in, subscribing to them, and then having your webpage/client/whatever set to show “Subscribed” rather than “All”.
If you want a convenient way to browse a list of communities on all instances (even ones that nobody on your home instance has subscribed to yet — you can be the first one!), I recommend https://lemmyverse.net/ and clicking on “Communities”. If you see one you like, say, !strategy_games@piefed.world, then just search for it on your home instance (like, the text
!strategy_games@piefed.world), and if your home instance doesn’t know about it yet, it’ll tell your home instance about it. Then subscribe to it, and traffic there will show up when you browse “Subscribed”.EDIT: Note that Mbin and PieFed communities are, somewhat-unintuitively, shown in their own lists, probably because the three software packages don’t provide the same pieces of information about communities and lemmyverse.net wants to let you be able to search using all available search criteria, rather than just the least-common-denominator stuff. If you want to search for communities on Mbin or PieFed, select those from the menu in the upper left.
Probably because they’re easy to make, so there’s a lot of traffic there.
It’s easier to create a meme than writing a title?
“why does the content I see not reflect what I want to see”
Lemmy all frontpage is filled with memes and shitpost, it’s a fact you can check for yourself. I’m asking why is it filled with this content, are you saying that this is what most people want to see here?
It’s easier to create a meme than writing a title?
It’s easier to create a meme than it is many other sorts of content.
I’m asking why is it filled with this content, are you saying that this is what most people want to see here?
The All feed will reflect what people want to post, as it all shows up there (well, all the stuff in communities that at least one user on your home instance subscribes to).
That’s why I’m saying that you’re probably going to be happier whitelisting the content that you are interested in, rather than complaining that people on the Threadiverse as a whole aren’t posting what you want. There are many different takes on what people want to see, so no one person is going to be happy with traffic as an aggregate. There are a bunch of furries here, who are happy with furry content. One of the first threads I ran into when I first joined — Kbin sent people to random posts to try to help them discover new communities — was a post talking about technology issues. Another user there, who also appeared to be a new user sent there randomly by Kbin, was upset that there was so many furries there and complaining about the fact. It was in a community on pawb.social, which is a furry instance. There’s no reasonable way to make the guy who didn’t want to see furry content and the people who do want to see furry content simultaneously happy with any one single collection of content. Gotta produce user-specific feeds for that.
EDIT: There are also some people who prefer to blacklist rather than whitelist. Like, browse All, but then just keep blocking every community that they don’t want to see. I think that this doesn’t scale well — I mean, there are tens of thousands of communities out there. Some people can create shit-tons of communities, and I suspect that sooner or later someone is very probably going to set up an instance that has auto-generated communities for one reason or another. Maybe to mirror RSS feeds somewhere or something, who knows. There’s already one that mirrors Reddit subreddits, lemmit.online. Then it’s going to flood the feeds of the blacklisters. But, well, that’s another way to curate content.
rather than complaining that people on the Threadiverse as a whole aren’t posting what you want.
All frontpage is filled with memes and shitpost, again are you saying that this is what most people want to see?
All frontpage is filled with memes and shitpost, again are you saying that this is what most people want to see?
I mean, I don’t know how I can be clearer than I was in the above comment:
The All feed will reflect what people want to post, as it all shows up there (well, all the stuff in communities that at least one user on your home instance subscribes to).
It will have everything that people are posting on any communities that any single user on your home instance subscribes to. This means that the proportion of traffic on All will generally reflect what people want to post.
There are some social media websites that try to profile you based on your viewing or commenting habits or other such things and then do recommendations of content. Some of these, like Twitter, have caught flak for recommending content that someone is likely to engage with, which causes them to tend to recommend ragebait material.
But regardless of the merits of one recommendation system or another, mander.xyz is running Lemmy. Lemmy doesn’t, in 2026, have some sort of system to profile you, try to predict what posts you want to see, and then show you only that. Maybe it should and someone should write that, but today, it gives you three choices:
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You can view All, which is all of the posts in any community that anyone on your home instance has subscribed to.
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You can view Local, which is all of the posts in communities on your home instance alone. Unless you are only interested in using the Threadiverse for highly-specialized content and on a home instance dedicated to that content, this probably isn’t what you want.
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You can view Subscribed, which is all of the posts in any community that you personally have subscribed to.
What I’m saying is that it is very likely that the third option is going to very probably provide you with a higher proportion of content that you want to see. “All” will probably never reflect what you in particular are most-interested in. It’s maybe a way to help expose new users to a sampling of what’s out there, reduce the barrier to start them using the Threadiverse, but you’re probably going to want a Subscribed list tailored to your interests.
But what I can say with utter certainty is that people who are posting memes will not stop posting memes because you don’t want to see as many memes in your feed, and All is going to reflect what people post. Getting upset about what people are posting and then complaining about that won’t solve your problem. Writing a recommendation system to profile users and provide recommended feeds for Threadiverse servers might, if you can code, but I’m guessing that the most-practical solution is going to be just doing a set of communities tailored to your interests, and then browsing Subscribed.
I asked a simple question and you are bringing in twitter and other stuff.
I asked a simple question
Heh. So, there’s this Saturday Night Live skit from 1997:
https://youtu.be/OMNaTApbo8E?t=130
Harry Caray: “Hey, if you were a hotdog, and you were starving, would you eat yourself?”
Host: “What?”
Harry Caray: “I know I would. First I’d smother myself in brown mustard and relish. I’d be so delicious. So would you?”
Host: “I don’t know.”
Harry Caray: “Don’t jerk me around, Norm. It’s a simple question. A baby could answer it. If you were a hotdog and you were starving, would you eat yourself?”
He gave an elaborate yes. Yes, memes are frontpage because that’s what is up voted. People like pics. Even in comments, I find my replies that include a photo get far more up votes than text alone.
Translation: Please confirm my existing views in a manner I can comprehend. I haven’t the capacity to utilize nuanced helpful answers. Thank you.
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deleted by creator
so are words
How many languages do you speak and why do you think there are more than one langue if words are universal?
most memes comes with a caption and a title.
Have a nice day.
I’m kind of sad this thread has so much thoughtful discussion and so few memes.
Wouldn’t it be better to have more serious threads and less memes that hint at political/news arguments?
No. It would not. There’s plenty of thoughtful discussion to find here, but the memes are the joyful cascade that carries us between thoughtful discussions.
Fast content takes less time than consume, so gets up votes faster than longer content. More people are likely to look at something that take 3 secs than 10 mins to read, this there’s no barrier to even begin consuming it.
Wouldn’t it be better to have more serious threads and less memes that hint at political/news arguments?
Wouldn’t it be better to let people enjoy what they want and block the communities or posters who have content you don’t like?
by default Lemmy’s home page displays what people are sharing (the ‘All’ option). That’s why my own Lemmy home page only display the content I’m subscribed to (no meme, or barely any)
As for the other part of your question why and how would people be forced to use memes? Memes are very low-effort, it’s to be expected they gather more traction than more demanding type of contents.
Memes are very low-effort
Funny you should say that, I’ve spent like 4-5 hours revising a kinda niche vampires meme for posting soon. But yeah, most memes are a lot lower effort.
Indeed I should have been more specific and you’re right: most of them are, not all.
As for the other part of your question why and how would people be forced to use memes?
To me lemmy frontpage much resemble reddit frontpage where most likely political and serious discussions are censored resulting in memes being more popular and the only tool people have to bring up certain arguments.
lemmy is not reddit, people simply share what they want to share.
This is why it’s important to learn how to filer content you don’t care to see. Like I told you I barely see any meme, if at all, because my home page is only showing content from communities I’m subscribed to and those are not focusing on memes.
people simply share what they want to share.
So are you saying shitpost and memes is what most people want to share here?
You ask ‘wouldn’t it be better’ if there were less memes
The community, through it’s posting, voting, and reposting, has chosen Memes regardless of whether it’d be better.
A lot of answers in here say “that’s how the fediverse works, people post what they want and engage with what they want, what they don’t want they can unsubscribe or block to curate their own feed, to avoid seeing parts of what the collective is sharing/talking about when using memes”.
What you’re describing requires unilateral control over what content various communities will engage in. It doesn’t matter if that’s what people like, so much as it’s what people continue to choose. If they like it, great. If they don’t, they’ll either curat their feed and not have a clue what you’re talking about regarding memes on the Frontpage, or they aren’t bothered or even like the memes on the Frontpage and aren’t looking to seek out more nuanced discussions and serious threads.
The community, through it’s posting, voting, and reposting, has chosen Memes regardless of whether it’d be better.
So why are people choosing memes over more serious discussions?
Heat rises and some memes are fire.
Memes good.
hey, if you want a feed of lemmy communities that aren’t focused on memes, politics, or tech, look at this: https://piefed.social/f/highsignal
Your question is confusing because:
- I rarely see a meme on Lemmy.
- The term frontpage isn’t common, or it’s from a specific UI on Lemmy.
- There isn’t a frontpage channel used to curate posts.
Can you put an edit at the bottom of this, something like:
“”" Edit: When I said frontpage, I mean the page that initially loads, the one that shows your subscribed channels or if you have none “All”. “”"
I block all meme communities. It really cleans up the feed
It’s an inevitable outcome of its structure. With memes, it’s usually just the low-information image, which is typically visible from the post listing. There’s no article to read, no video to watch (or just a very short one), no question to think about, and you can upvote it straight from the post listing, so there’s not even a link to click. In other words, memes have a very low barrier-to-upvote compared to other types of posts, and as a result, are more likely to get upvotes and end up on the front page.
For serious conversation what you really want is a forum or only join communities on Lemmy where memes are frowned upon.
Easier to spend 3 seconds reading a meme and updooting it then 3 minutes reading a article and doing the same. Don’t use all if you’re looking for high brow/non-sensational content.
I disagree, most memes have elaborated descriptions longer than the average title
What six paragraph memes are you reading?
