this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2026
6 points (55.2% liked)

Ask Lemmy

36612 readers
1178 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] tal@lemmy.today 13 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

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:

  • You can view All, which is all of the posts in any community that anyone on your home instance has subscribed to.

  • 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.

  • 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.