Why is my entire feed in this Lemmy server nothing but American politics and Reddit bashing

Lemmy does not have an engagement based algorithm. It does not over analyze your every move to keep you on the site. This means you will have to do content curation yourself.
First of all, the block button exists, use liberally.
Second, the subscribe button exists, so use it to curate a nice subscribed feed
Third, I do believe there are third party clients (lemmy apps made by others) that have a word filter feature which allow you to automatically hide post and comments which contain certain keywords. (I think Voyager has that. Download mobile app here. Use the site version of the app here. Keep in mind that it uses lemm.ee as its default instance.)
But yeah, content curration is kinda just left up to you. Subscribe, Block. That's it.
Alternatively, you could join a "themed instance", that is, an instance made to house a particular community or interest, like that star-trek instance, but Lemmy does not have enough users for those to be able to exist.
If you want creative stuff, might want to have a look at !artshare@lemmy.world? Sorry, I don't have much for you.
- Third, I do believe there are third party clients (lemmy apps made by others) that have a word filter feature which allow you to automatically hide post and comments which contain certain keywords. (I think Voyager has that. Download mobile app here. Use the site version of the app here. Keep in mind that it uses lemm.ee as its default instance.)
  !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca has a pinned post with a guide on how to block keywords

Did you try subscribing to your interests?

The key is that you need to subscribe to the type of content you want to see. There's no company here deciding what your feed is going to be.
@BackgrndNoize@lemmy.world, what kind of stuff are you interested in? I'm happy to help you find related communities :)

I have two feeds: one is "subscribed" for all the stuff I'm actually interested in, and the other is "all", for when I'm up for a bit of US politics, Reddit-bashing and weird German memes..

Hey OP, I just want to say from experience the reddit bashing usually dies down a bit after a quick spike of reddit refugees like we're seeing now.

Those are the most popular posts. I recommend trying to find communities that you like and subscribing to them, then read the subscribed feed.
- I recommend finding communities you don't like and blocking those, then browse the all feed. Otherwise you get 3 posts a week.
  
  That's not true. I've got a pretty active feed of subs, you just need to spend time curating a good list
  
  i did that and my feed is still filled with politics there are so many to block its neverending
  
  There's also "hide this post" and "hide all viewed posts" but you have to actually click on them ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

Set your default view to the communities you subscribe to. Don't subscribe to communities that overlap with politics or reddit.
- I also set keyword filters so I don't see that stuff in case they start sneaking into my favorite communities
  
  Which communities are you in 😁
  J/k

The majority of folk that migrated from Reddit probably did so because of reasons related to those two things.
- The earliest exoduses were socialist political communities banned from reddit (particularly /r/chapotraphouse who formed Hexbear, and /r/GenZedong who landed in Lemmygrad). Then, the most recent exodus is related to censorship related to Luigi Mangione, a US political issue, coinciding with a strong sudden re-emergence of global anti-American [government] sentiment due to diplomatic catastrophes with a range of former allies.
  In fact, the founders cite reddit's corporate nature and its pro-US-imperialist, racist stances as their motivation to create Lemmy: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/07-history-of-lemmy.html
  So I'm not surprised at all that the default feed is covered in political topics, it's always been a strong topic here and it's just gotten stronger. But there's probably enough activity now that one can filter it out and still have enough action to keep it fun.

I know - it's exhausting.
All social and news streams are absolutely being flooded by American politics right now. It's mad and crazy stuff, but there's only so much someone can take before it really starts to affect ones mental state.
And Lemmy partially started as a not-reddit, so I guess it's normal that people come to vent.
So - positive stuff you can do!
Subscribe to more communities that do interest you. Leave less space for the other stuff to come in. You can also block communities from your main feed very easily if you're being given stuff you don't want from them.
Youtube (with adblock) is hardly affected (or if it is, I don't see it). That brings lots of interesting and creative content.
Going out into the world if you're able. Reconnecting with nature, and also being reminded that people, by and large, are usually nice to you if you're nice to them.
And I've been picking up old games and playing them more. Escapism is not such a bad thing.

I noticed that too. I’m American but don’t give a shit about politics because it’s just too upsetting.
Go to the communities posting about it and click the 3 dots in the upper right hand corner and block the sub. I had to do this over the course of about 2 days while subbing to ones I enjoyed.
Still learning how to navigate this site and find communities I enjoy, but for the most part I’m not seeing the politics anymore. Hope this helps at least a little
- Thank you for sharing!
  !communitypromo@lemmy.ca can help to discover active communities as well
  
  Sweet thanks!

You do know you could have just asked how to curate your feed without whining, right? I mean, if there's enough negativity and stress in your life, why bring negativity with you?
I mean, I could give you the advice without snarkiness about it, but I want to make the point that it not only isn't necessary to complain about what content is there, it's counterproductive. Just ask what you want to know, and you'll get better answers.
The first step is to curate your feed.
There's three options: all, local and subscribed. All is going to pull in every instance and community that your instance is federated with, and has been visited by someone from your instance. To curate that feed, you block communities that present content you don't want to see.
For the subscribed feed, obviously, you only get the things you choose to subscribe to, so it takes as long or longer to set up as blocking on all. So you'll have to search your interests directly if you don't want to scroll all to find things to subscribe to.
The local feed is only content from your instance. You can block things as they come up and trim away things you don't want to see, but you'd be better off taking a few days to check out what instances have the least communities that feature content you don't like, then join one of those and that way need to do less blocking.
However, some apps offer filtering, if you're on mobile. Afaik, all the popular ones do, and most of the less popular ones, so you'd need to go to your app store and see what looks best to you.
You can usually filter keywords that way. I filter some of the more repetitive names that pop up in political communities so that it isn't the majority of my feed, but still lets in some that if I blocked communities, would restrict my feed too much. That's just an example of one way to go about it.
I prefer filters over blocks most of the time, with blocks being reserved for communities that are totally unpleasant, or aren't useful for my needs at all. Filters in an app let you really fine tune things.
For you, I think a hybrid approach via an app will work best. Filter the term reddit, block any communities that you find that are based on reddit subjects.
Then, block political communities that are US specific, and slowly filter out via terms like democrat, republican, and the usual politicians. That way, you'll avoid us issues without missing out on news that's relevant to you and your needs.
I don't think you'll get as well tuned via browser, even when alternative front ends.
- Any tips on filtering? I mean, I still care about some important international political topics, I just don't care much for trump, JD, musk etc. Also, Democrat and Republican might be present in other topics not about the US political system, right? Are there wildcards/regex/something else I could use? Some best practice guides?
  
  Honestly, it depends on the app. I only use a few. Sync, boost, and connect only seem to handle full words, no wildcards afaik.
  Eternity though, it has all the options for filters. Tbh though, I'm not great with regex, so I don't use that on eternity. It has it though.
  Generally, I only filter the stuff that clogs the feed. Filtering trump tends to cut out repeat posts that link to the same article, but since he's not always in the title, some news about him gets through, which is about where I like it.
  Filtering parties definitely cuts out some foreign news, since plenty of them reference the parties. I haven't gotten flooded with those terms being allowed now that the election is over, it's a fairly manageable rate.
  I guess what I'm saying is that I adjust what I filter fairly often. When there's a surge in a topic, I check the headlines and titles and pick what is going to filter most of the posts, but not all of them.
  Like, right now, on sync I'm filtering "stocks" to reduce the tesla stuff without it filtering out other news around the company. If I filtered tesla entirely, I'd miss protests and such.
  
  https://lemmy.world/post/24545370

Lemmy.world
- Ironic considering Lemmy.world is Dutch I believe
  
  Besides the server hosting location there appears to be very little Dutch about it.
  But then again the Dutch politicians are known to kowtow America does. The Netherlands recently voted against the EU defense spending because they love NATO and the orange man so much.
- Do you have any instances you suggest, I'm new to fediverse and picked this one at random
  
  Every instance has its ups and downs. Account age is of little value so I would say use your current account for a while and explore the different instances.
  You can also make different accounts on different instances with the same username. That practice is totally normal.
  Because .world is the biggest instance it tends to be the most Reddit like. Maybe try lemmy.sdf if you want a different more local experience.

Why are there obituaries in the obituaries column?
Customize your feed and/or block whatever you want to filter it, buddy. There’s a Reddit exodus because of American-centered events, so you’re going to see American-centric news and Reddit-bashing stories in some default feeds for a bit. Filter it out and move on.
- Do you know of any prospecting forums?

    ~~~~Part of the reason Lemmy is seeing a lot of growth is that posts critical of the trump administration, Luigi Mangioni, critical of reddit, etc. Are either being banned, removed or burried by algorithms, so if you want to discuss them you HAVE to come here. 

What I think you need to do is have multiple accounts, I have one with a LOT of filters. "Trump, Drumpf, Trumpist, MAGA, Elon, Musk, Tesla, Rep, Republican " you get the idea. Any community I have no interest in blocked, plenty of users who go into benign subs and bring up politics blocked...  Its my relaxing feed. NSFW filter on

 I have one with the only filter being the nsfw one. I see the whole disaster.

I have one on Lemmy.nsfw... for reasons. Filter by local... 



I have one

Why is your comment a code block?
- I for one appreciate it when the AI let us know up front that we are conversing with a machine.

Check your subs.

I was kind of hoping for more Western African culture, news and discussion from this Mali-based server.
- Well there's some lovely anti-imperialist coups going on in West Africa recently, here please read these 30 news articles about Burkino Fa
- Unfortunately, the ML from lemmy.ml is appropriation and it actually means Marxist-Leninist

Do you mean to tell me you don't also have a bunch of Linux memes?

Average dotworld experience.

I'm starting to see that most Canadians are more interested in american politics than in their own countries politics. When a gigantic behemoth is wounded, and about to fall, you get a lot of rubberneckers. Sadly, I include myself in this list.
- I feel like we always have been - the Trudeau Sr. quote comes to mind:
  Living next to you [The U.S.] is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.
  Only more so now that said beast is trumpeting, stomping its feet and shitting everywhere.
  
  That's a good quote! Thanks.
- If it's falling towards you, it is indeed good to pay attention to that. Also, please accept my apologies that our bullshit is spilling over the line.
- As a Canadian, I engage more with American politics online because more online content is American politics than Canadian.
  
  Would you like to discuss the failure of the liberal party to deliver on promised electoral reform?

Are you talking about Lemmy.world, or Lemmy.ml? Either way, I'd say to look for an instance that more appeals to you.
- Why is it always you two,jpeg

Try another planet which is not on fire, sorry for going all political on you!
- They'll surprise-pikachu when WWlll starts and they don't know how we got there.
  
  Capitalism
- Sounds like you gave up. Sorry can't do that.
  
  Give up is my middle name Fuck "give up" That McGee the 3rd

Come visit !dullsters@dullsters.net or !dull_mens_club@lemmy.world

You joined the wrong instance bud
Sad youll never see this comment as world has me on the bad boy list
- Did .world finally defederate from .ml? Will we finally stop seeing cringe feudposting from .worlders?
  Doubtful.
  
  No but they banned me about a year or so ago for 'multiple reactionary posts across multiple instances'
  They just didn't like me saying Ukraine is going to end up exactly where they are today.

How to use Ublock Origin to filter keywords out
Also you can block certain instances/communities/users. You can practice blocking users on me first!

I don't see much of that stuff. I mostly subscribe to foss communities and I mostly see relevant stuff about foss and tech. Subscribe to communities pertaining to your hobbies/interests and your feed should reflect that
- And block the ones that are filled with content you don't want. I've spent the last six months or so fine tuning my feed and see lots of stuff that's interesting to me and very little that I don't want.

Man, I’m with you! A lot of people are commenting that you should just curate your feed - man, that means unsubscribing from news and politics. I mean there are a lot of other countries news I’m interested in seeing. And I already have an app that lets me filter out content based on keywords and my feed is still filled with US content.
The amount of US content is just overwhelming and it’s freaking everywhere. I know I’m not alone in frankly having had enough of it.
Can’t people post this stuff into dedicated US communities?
- Join a different instance, there are ones that are more curated for different regions in the world. Lemmy.world is very US centric and essentially a carbon cut-out of reddit. Lots of redditors migrate there and try to maintain that type of culture on the instance, so they also got many of the most toxic complainers condensed from mass reddit exoduses.
  The fediverse is meant to be explored and it may take you a month or two to find where you like best.
- Feel free to remind people to post US questions to !AskUSA@discuss.online
- I haven't figured out how to get mine to where I was on reddit back in the day. I struggle with finding communities. I often find dead communities. I often can't find communities I've come across in the past when using the search to specifically find them. Any tips on how to solve this labyrinth?
  
  https://lemmy.world/post/26409821
  https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active (use the home icon to set your home instance so that it opens the communities there)
  !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca

leave .world and block the entire instance and then you get stuff that isn't related to the United States it's really nice actually
- Or join an instance they don't like and they curate themselves for you. :)

Use a filter and remove everything dedicated to US politics and Reddit to reduce the quantity by 80%

Block a shit ton of political and Reddit communities
Subscribe to everything else
Only browse Subscribed
- Is there some secret fourth option where you complain non stop to your instances admins to defederate from instances you don't like to save you the trouble of blocking them yourself?
- This is the way to go!
  
  Knakkers!

Clearly you don’t frequent the NSFW forums

I block the news and politics communities. That helps tremendously

Just like Reddit, you need to curate your feed. Don't browser all/local, browse your subscriptions. Here's a list of subs that aren't political https://lemmy.world/post/16327122 - subscribe to ones that interest you.
Also feel free to liberally block communities. It's trivial to do.

Have you tried filtering the home page? I'm very new to Lemmy so my advice may not be the best, but on the home page (I'm' using lemmyusa), there is a "Location" option and I changed it from "All" to "Subscriptions". This way I only get the sub communities I've subscribed to.
I have not found a way to hide a sub community (i.e. hide "politics" or something) from the main feed.
If someone with more experience with Lemmy can sherd some additional advice for focusing content I would appreciate it!

Godzilla, Esperanto, tiny phones, vampires, the weird knife Wednesday guy, and way too many silly Linux memes. Homelab, self-host. That's what Lemmy is to me! I mostly skip the politics, although I do like the odd privacy rant. Also, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, by Sara Wynn-Williams. That's unrelated to anything, but I intend to include it in any comment I make until I read it.
- Is there a way that I can get the book without giving an ex-Facebook exec money?
  
  Yes it's called sailing the sea

I use the frontend called tesseract on my computer and block keywords "trump" "elon" "washington" "musk" "republicans" "democrats" and then I judiciously block communities that make it to all with stuff I don't care about like European boycotts and pretty much anything about Canada.

Sort by "hot" instead of active.
- Pretty sure mine is sorted by "hot" too and politics still appear. Let me go check it.
  
  Well, politics will always appear, but sometimes the same posts stay at the top of people's feed in the active sort.

I haven't seen any Reddit bashing in a good while actually. American politics however, I have lots of in my feed. But you can filter them out, I don't because I'm lazy. I just scroll past those.

Reddit was already mostly American politics, most of the people who came kept the same ratios. Personally I see more non American posts then ever on lemmy, it needs to grow. Post and spread it around

As corollary to the other comments, lemmyverse.net to find non-political communities to subscribe to.

be the change.

Because that's what people are posting.

There's plenty of fun stuff that's neither of those. Check out photography or opossums or silly drawing request. That two sentence horror group is good. So is daily games.

2 reasons:
Mods don't seem to give a shit
Lemmy has the exact same issues as Reddit, minus the corporate bullshit. Users do the same stupid shit. People don't magically become not fucking stupid and horrible because they move from Reddit to the Fediverse.
- Based
- Yes, lemmy still concentrates power in the hands of instance owners and their moderation delegates. This structures all discourse and communitiesin a certain way, discourage experimentation, alternate topics and viewpoints but instead focuses attention toward, for each topic, "the one big community" and its contingent idiosyncrasies.
  Only way around this is transparent multiserver communities and frictionless account and community server migration.
  Without this the same structure of power will always replicate itself.
  
  instead focuses attention toward, for each topic, “the one big community” and its contingent idiosyncrasies.
  !politics@lemmy.world, !usa@lemmy.ml and !politics@hexbear.net being all active in parallel seems to shows that the model is working

As others have said: filter filter filter. Lemmy is small enough still that you can massively curate by blocking communities and even users where you don't like what they post.

Normal people don't give a shit about Lemmy. If you want to dive into hobbies, local news and other fun stuff - go to Reddit :)
- *post stuff about hobbies, local news and other fun stuff to Lemmy so those communities grow
- Joined 3 months ago. 0 posts, 63 comments. This says a lot about your type of user.
- !gardening@lemmy.world
  !crochet@lemmy.ca
  !woodworking@lemmy.ca
  !Dullsters@dullsters.net
  
  Gardening on Reddit has 7.8m subs, that's more than the whole Fediverse with all the bots.
  Another issue is the quality of people. For example, I'm into kitchen knives. Dr. Larrin posts on Reddit about steels and related metallurgy. Does he post on Lemmy? No. Stroppy Stuff posts on Reddit about strops and sharpening. Does he post on Lemmy? No.
  I'm also into mountain biking. Reddit is full of engineers, brand representatives and athletes, none of them is on Lemmy.
  No one worth their salt gives a shit about Lemmy, that's the hard truth. If you want to get quality hobby content - you go to Reddit.
  Lemmy is for 15yo kids posting memes and US politics for those who got banned on Reddit. And for some devs to satiate their curiosity.

If you switch to programming.dev most political stuff gets automatically filtered away unless you're subscribed to it. Give it a try.

All I see is posts from "memes" I mean, I'm not angry, I just need to subscribe to more stuff

Lemmy is a giant echo chamber, every time I browse for a bit I block a community/user or two. And don't you dare have a differing political opinion to that of the hive mind.
It's not really a good reddit replacement but if like me you don't want to install the official reddit app lemmy can be some sort of nicotine patch if you take the time to block all the shit you don't want to see
- I’m mean there is no real downside to having and sharing an opinion outside the “hive mind”
  “Karma” on Lemmy isn’t tracked. Having a negative score comment or post doesn’t affect your account or experience at all. I’ve posted plenty that has gotten downvoted into the negative and I haven’t even gotten a warning because Lemmy is an actual free speech platform unlike twitter or Reddit.
  That doesn’t mean that everyone has to like your opinions though, hence the downvotes, but that’s ok.
- Calling Lemmy echo chamber is disingenuous there are only two things we all agree on it seems...
  Luigi did nothing wrong and Israel is doing genocide... Otherwise its a FFA of ideas... IMHO
  
  Lemmy is an echo chamber.

Okay, cool. You filtered it. People post and participate in those discussions because they want to for some reason. I you have something you'd prefer to discuss, go ahead and start a conversation.