What communities or instances do you have blocked to make your Lemmy experience more enjoyable?

A bunch if german communities. No hate to the Germans, I just don't understand your deeply ridiculous language

Nothing, but i have a word blocklist on trump, elon and ice. So that way I am up to date because some stuff still comes through, but not knee deep in the fascism takeover of the US (at least on Lemmy 🥲)

games I don't play but which tend to clutter All by being highly posted/active (Hololive, Honkaistarrail, etc.)
"stop drinking" related comms because they were too frequent in the feed, I already stopped drinking because I'm too old and cranky to deal with hangovers, and a lot of them were giving me creepy cult vibes tbh
"witchesvspatriarchy" and related because I find that kind of humor snobby and grating
a few other women/feminism related comms. I'm a lesbian who struggles with internalized misogyny, I'll fully admit that. But some of these posts are unhinged misandry and a lot of them are just depressing to read and probably not good for my mental health

Don't have any instances blocked, but I block all the political, trans, furry, and mental illness communities. I wish people wouldn't post political stuff to the YSK or general memes communities, there are 5 million better places to post that on lemmy, but it's manageable.

trans, furry, and mental health communities
I'm surprised you have anything left to view on Lemmy.
- I'm really just here for the memes and tech/science stuff, and the occasional interesting discussion
trans, furry, and mental illness in the same breath?
If lemmy were sane you would have been banned months ago
- Huh? I'm literally talking about like anxiety memes, adhd, autism, etc. Just not topics I find interesting.
- God forbid another human being has its own preference and acts on them without harming anyone

I don’t have any. I instead subscribe to as many communities I find interesting and set my feed to only my subscriptions. I rarely venture out to All and only do when I want to discover more communities.

I use the opposite strategy, which is what I did on Reddit: browse All, and block everything that isn't interesting. Sports teams, shows I didn't care about, other niche communities. I prefer this approach because I like finding content I never would have thought to subscribe to.
- I alternate. I have my own curated list of subscriptions, which is mostly serious reading, so I'll spend some time perusing that.
  And then I move to All and enjoy the randomness, sometimes adding communities to my subscriptions, sometimes banning subs or content creators if they annoy me.
I’ve found this is exactly the best way to enjoy Lemmy.
That's what I do, too. However, I did block some communities, mostly meme- or politics related, so I can briefly browse the "all" category once in a while.

Personally I block anything that ends with "moe" I'm not really into thirst traps and anime thirst traps feel like the bottom of an already unwanted barrel.

Oh yeah, forgot about this. Each time I rotate accounts I’ve got to go on an anime blocking spree. Nothing against anime but the fans are creeps.
- Thankfully you can block a handful of users and then you won't get included in their new perversions.
Thiccmoe aren't even thicc.
Whack-a-Moe. Seems endless. I point to that as a main reason lemmy will never gain popularity.
- Since it might help your feed, I'll share something that worked for me.
  I realized that we have a relatively small number of very active Moe champions who post to a variety of topical Lemmy's. I switched to blocking those users, and it cleared Moe content from my feed.

Mostly just sports communities. They tend to post a lot, and I just don't really care about sports outside of Motorsport. If Arsenal has some insane game, or gets a great player signed, I'll hear about it at work sooner or later, either from coworkers or a customer. I would say the only big sport that doesn't apply to between those played in North America and Europe is probably cricket, cause nobody has time for it. Then again, haven't seen a single cricket post, either.

I can stay current on what's going on with the NFL, NBA, MLB, Premier League, rugby and even hurling, just by showing up to work, so there's no real benefit to seeing it here, too.

Also, AI communities get blocked pretty much as soon as they pop up in my feed. The novelty of "Hah, that's crazy that a computer made this image" has long since worn off, and I have no interest in seeing the umpteenth iteration of some AI take on art or photography.

I don't have the option ticked to show nsfw content, and people have generally been good about tagging such content, so I haven't had to block anything there.

Sports and Linux.

I have no interest in sports.

I also have no interest in Linux, I have installed and used Linux around ten years ago. If and when I need Linux I'll just go to the mainstream internet or just unblock them and join. But for now no.

All the non-English ones. If I can't read it then there's no point to having it clutteting things up.

Also all the porn. That's not what I'm here for.

So much furry content, holy smokes.

Blocked most furry and trans communities. I'm not against it, not into it and its overrepresented here for obvious reasons.

whoo boy time to block infosec.pub...
- Made me laugh, anyway.
  For those not in on the joke:
  Some of today's best hackers are members of the furry community, and infosec.pub is a hub for Cybersecurity discussions.

Have LꝏꝏꝏTs communities blocked , but noteworthy types :

Most (meme|shitpost|news) communities . Oversaturation from seemingly homogenous threadiverse userbase
- (Meme|shitpost) content dœsn't lend itself well to conversations (which's what am here for) IMO . If I wanted those I'd just browse tumblr oar some thing
- Prefer getting my news elsewhere
"(Cringe|Trashy)"-adjacent communities . Thankfully not many exist
All (.*)(girl|babe)s NSFW communities , don't like seeing photorealistic imgs of conventionally attractive women

As far's instances , only one can remember 🏧's hilariouschaos bcus TERF community on there I think

When I got started on Lemmy, browsing All, I was stunned by all the Furry/Brony crap. Blocking that made All more feasible... but man, it was a lot!

The tankie triad and anything anime related. I swear anime bros make a new comm for each of their favorite characters in a specific outfit

Anything with anime "Mo", porn, or "furry" in it. I'm not hating on them, it's just not for me.

what is mo?

The German ones who have the language set to English but only post in German. And the reason should be pretty obvious: They're assholes who are intentionally clogging up the feed of another language.

Same. I block every instance and topic thats not in english. I cant read it and am not about to learn danish or german or whatever it is, so its an utter waste of my and lemmys time and bandwidth to show it to me. It should really be a standard feature.
They mostly don't have the language set at all, like 99% of all posts and the reason is nobody cares.
I actually really enjoy translating the whole comments pages sometimes if I get the meme through context clues, can't tell if things get lost in translation or German humor is just really odd though..

Blocked furry and most trans stuff. A ton of the porn that littered my feed. That’s probably 75% of my blocklist. Many non-english communities, though I’ve kept a few to run through translators just to see what’s going on in other countries. Communities with high post counts of memes that spam my feed. Any /c with no interest in good faith discussion.

This is why i think subject tagging for communities makes a lot of sense. I want to remove anime, k-pop, video games, sports, region-specific, tv/movie, “anarchy”/“everything sucks” and plenty of other entire categories from my “All” feed, but blocking is a never-ending effort.

Great idea. I'd love a "No German" switch.
- Es gibt kein Entkommen!
- Best we can do is a "No, German" switch.
- Den erwischen wir!!

"Elon" "Musk" "Trump" "Donald"

Is your feed empty then?
- Nah, should be plenty of star trek and Linux remaining
I did the same! Much more enjoyable experience

Too many to list but in general:

Non-English
Politics
Anime
AI gen
Ball sports
NSFW/Cosplay
Furry

i had to block the main politics one, because they start shilling for israel low-key.

The whole lemmynsfw instance. Don't need that distraction here.

Text filters - any keywords for news topics that I've had enough of (mostly reoccurring political topics)

Weird meme shit from some strange community (or something that is just not my generation) - block the whole community.

A poster who's engaging in bad faith - blocked, never to be heard from again.

I also set my mobile client (Connect) to mark posts that I've scrolled by as read, and to only show unread posts.

I filter by All / Top 6 hours

My experience on Lemmy is getting better and better, and I feel no need to doom scroll here.

Hexbear is blocked for me.

hexbear,ml, lemmygrad all filled with nasty people.
- Aka all the instances that make lemmy worth hanging around for.
- 😘

Almost all anime and a lot of the ai communities

Mostly just subjects I don't have any interest in, such as football, F1, etc.

Anything involving AI image generation

I have the lemmy.ml instance blocked, some non-English speaking and anime communities blocked.

None, but my frontpage is subscribed communities only.

No instances, but I've blocked 868 communities so far. Either languages I don't understand or topics I'm not interested in... the vast majority of which being sports and anime/furry porn.

I've found I don't really subscribe to communities to see a feed of just those. I'd rather see EVERYTHING and curate the feed reductively. Kinda seemed sisyphean at first, but my 'All' is fairly personalized now, so I'd recommend that approach to anyone who browses All frequently.

I think I've blocked over 500 communities. Not because they're all bad, mostly because it's stuff I'm not interested in.

Do not feel bad about blocking communities you're disinterested in. It cuts out the noise for you.

When I scroll all, I block anything that doesn’t relate to my tastes. It would be best if there was a way to block certain topics.

Anything Linux. We get it. You like Linux. If I wanted to be converted by religious nuts I'd still be talking to a whole side of my family.

Arch BTW
I'd like to talk to you about climate change. Do you happen to have a minute?

Mostly porn communities that I dont vibe with or are what I would consider to be disgusting, like incest, sounding, and farting. Ive also banned a lot of furry communities, not because I dislike it but because its also a lot of porn. Anything AI is banned with prejudice. I have a lot of foreign ones banned but I realized I could just mute them instead, oh well.

Oh my god, soooooo many. An unreal amount of dreck here. The worst part is that I've blocked all that stuff and now it's mostly terrible world news. And so, to answer your question, no it hasn't made the experience here better. I guess my interests don't jive with the main niches around here.

The short answer is anything I don't like or want to see. The shorter answer is .ml.

A spider community because I ain't about that life as an arachnophobic person.
A bunch of minecraft communities because I completely ditched the game after they decided that Java players aren't allowed to use adult words anymore on their private single player worlds and also because of the whole chat thing where all messages you send are linked to your specific account.
Entomology because I don't fuck with bugs.
A few different AI communities because I try to avoid AI if possible.
A community about dicks and dick pics. Not my cup of tea and I don't feel like seeing them on any feed since I don't blur NSFW images.

Those are just a few. The rest are minor things or other communities that are the same thing essentially, but on different instances.

Pretty much all non English/Spanish/Portuguese/Italian instances. No point having them in my feed if I can't read them.

For Lemmy, kbin and piefed you can specifically choose which language posts you want to display if anyone doesn't want to go with instance blocking.
- Yeah, but if the community doesn't properly set their ~~package~~ language, they may end up breaking through depending on your setup.
- So many good communities don't have a language set, either because they didn't bother or they are multiligual.

There's a lot of freaky porn out there that I don't want to see

All the anime, furries, sports, non-English, news, and politics.

Virgin online activist vs the CHAD meme and amateur pornography enjoyer
- If that's what you are into... I'm not judging.

ZeroBytes.monster I don't want a reddit bot in my feed. I wanted a clean break during the reddit 3rd party app backstabbing.

Most of them I don't know why. I just came back to this account because of lemm.ee.

Got the tankie triad in there. I switched from lemm.ee too and forgot to reblock those, mentioned that term in a comment thread on .ml and the content got removed for "bigotry". Reassures having them in there is a good idea.
Lemmygrad.ml seems kinda obvious, but I have a completely naive question about lemmy.ml. Is it essentially the same? Why is it a controversial instance.
Based on just the sidebar description it sounds like a cool instance: A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers
But I also see a lot of people saying they have it blocked
- It's not as extreme as Lemmygrad, but there's a good deal of overlap.
  A lot of people, despite using Lemmy, also disagree ideologically with the developers of Lemmy, and feel as though it's a conflict of interest to both develop the platform and have a preferred instance on it.
  I don't block .ml and I think the majority of users there are fine, but there are a few specific people (a couple who I know also have alts on Lemmygrad) who just show up everywhere and tend to give the entire instance its reputation.
- I don't remember why I blocked .ml because it was a long time ago but I'd guess I got tired of the users and many of the communities bleeding tankies into the rest of Lemmy.
  I've heard that blahaj has changed a lot too but I haven't really noticed it not being in my feed so I haven't bothered to check.

Rick and Morty com. No explanation needed.

I didn't even know there was one

Politics and memes.

Social media is a terrible source for accurate, unbiased information. And memes are low quality content that shouldn't be consumed by anyone.

So far none.
Only individual users.

Meme communities, anime, sports, furries, hexbear, moe, and tankie instances. I just block these categories to maintain All as a viable browsing option. I want to be able to subscribe to a limited array of communities while keeping up with trends and events.

Lemmy.today and hilariouschaos.com for the same reason

Religion

Hexbear, AuthLeft

Advertising communities

Political parties

"General", unspecified non-meme communities (nowherelsetopost etc)

I don't block much but I do have a couple of filters that do good work on Piefed.

All the Sports and racing stuff. They're really spammy and i just don't care about sports.

I don't block entire instances, but I block every single community I'm not interested in - which probably adds up to over 500 by now. I tried blocking all the mean or extremist users, but that ended up completely killing my feed, since that seems to be about 80% of active commenters. So nowadays, I use content filters to screen for keywords in comments and posts. My list of keywords is quite substantial and keeps growing every week. At this point, I'd say about 50% of the threads on my homepage get filtered out. While I can’t know exactly how many comments are being hidden, I’d imagine it’s about the same.

Funnily enough, even after all that filtering, a significant portion of what still gets through is full of mean, snide remarks, tribalism, toxicity, negativity, doomerism, hopelessness, and that classic crabs-in-a-bucket mentality. A smart person would probably just give up and bail - but I guess I’m not that smart.

If everywhere you go smells like shit, it might be time to check your own shoes.
- As if a smug metaphor, delivered in the exact same dismissive tone I was criticizing is supposed to prove me wrong.
I have stopped using the "All" feed for that reason, it's best to find communities that you're interested in and only look at those in my experience. Finding them without the All feed is the challenge though. I've found Lemmy to be quite nice when it was new, but it seems this is the way all communities go when they reach a certain size.
- Using “All” is the best way to find those. How else are you really supposed to?

I browse mostly by All/Everything, and it's about an 70/20/10 split of non-English communities, sports communities, and anime communities respectively.

The non-English communities are typically on non-English local instances (feddit.org, feddit.nl, jlai.lu, etc), but I don't want to block those instances entirely because their users will still participate in other communities in English and it's not their fault that I just don't speak the language.

The sports communities are just because I don't typically care for that type of content. There are only a couple of sports I actively follow, and within those sports I don't need to see communities dedicated to each and every specific team, so I just block to filter the ones I have no interest in.

As for the anime, I actually do love anime, but a lot of them are communities for specific series I'm not into (which, if I'm being frank, are almost all just utter shit-tier waifu bait material), and others are very creepy "X"-moe communities which just make me feel gross when they turn up (and for those, blocking a single user was enough to get rid of 99% of that).

the extremist ones and the porn ones. include triad, i dont block bahaj one, as i have no issues with it.

All communities with AI generated content.

Just checked and it's a whole bunch of nsfw ones (I don't block all nsfw, but there are a lot of weird communities in that category that I don't need to see), a bunch of German ones because they were taking over the feed at one point, and theonion (which I don't really find funny anymore)

*meme*

Fuck cars, vegan communities, gender specific communities, cooking communities - because these types tend to be hard-line judgemental and fueled by hate (looking at you steak)

Mental health meme communities because they just post anything and say it's a trait of their condition. Does anyone else think about stuff? ADHD amiright?

Edit: oh and tHaNkSiMcUrEd because they just make fun of self help now

Anime art communities because there are so many and it's not my thing but I support their interests

Anything not in English because I can't read anything

Edit: users

@pixelmeow@lemmy.world @Theatomictruth@lemmy.dbzer0.com @spankmonkey@lemmy.world @pedz@lemmy.ca @RebekahWSD@lemmy.world @SineIraEtStudio@midwest.social @10OhmResistor@aussie.zone

I feel seen!
Wonder if they only blocked users who downvoted this one post or they do that regularly.

None. I can handle other ideas and opinions just fine.

wow that's ridiculously naive
- God forbid another human being has its own preference and acts on them without harming anyone
- Explain this.

Nothing. I go through my feed raw and unfiltered .ml, hexbear, and everything

I have to ask why sports? Surely there is some sport you are interested in.
I've recently discovered I've been lying to myself on baseball, and how much I loved the game as a kid and I regret not pursuing it after highschool all because of the mlb strikes in the 90s. I just stopped watching and participating. For me and a lot of people during that time I guess the mindset was, I work in the heat all day, not just for 3 hours and those players are bitching about the millions they make aren't enough. There's some truth to that but it completely blinded me to what I loved, now I'm to old to even compete in men's slow pitch leagues
Since my daughter is now playing softball, just playing catch and working with her on pitching has made me truly realize how great the game is, the feel of the glove, the sound of the bat cracking, or the sound of a fastball hitting a glove.
For a game that's been played as much for so long and there are still records being broken or first time for something is truly amazing.
My interest in football is at a all time low, no longer follow NFL, but still love college even though it's becoming a shadow of its former self.
And volleyball is peaking because of my daughter as well

Mostly murican politics, politics memes, trump/musk stuff (it's like playing whac-a-mole), some anime and furry stuff.

Some foreign language communities don't seem to have their language marked so they still show up despite my language settings, so I blocked them to make things easier.

None yet! Are there any I should be wary of?

Because you get it back in the form of services and perks.

None, although there's an ADHD sub that pops up often that is annoying and ive comsidered blocking it