Now all these f*ing zoomers are telling me that I'm out of touch!?

That's because the "rule" of !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone is to "post before you leave"... That creates a lot of random posts that all have some kind of "rule" in the title. Sometimes these posts get popular and you see them in your feed.

For the curious, the original was actually /r/195 on Reddit. It started as a joke between some college roommates, in dorm room number 195. Then it eventually got popular as a sort of shitposting community. But the original 195 was basically unmoderated (because it was just a couple of dudes in college who started it for shiggles,) and was eventually brigaded and taken over by alt-right neonazis. The memes quickly devolved into straight up Nazi propaganda.
So 196 was created as a sort of “new” 195, and that original brigade and subsequent takeover is why a lot of the 196 memes tend to lean hard left. The 196 sub was sort of a rebellion against the 195 takeover, which means that conservative stuff quickly got shut down. It eventually became a sort of safe space for transgender memes as a result. From there it became a sort of self-sustaining reaction where trans people saw it as safe so more trans people gravitated towards it.
- Thank you for the detailed explanation! I remember seeing it on reddit, but never knew why.
- It's always seemed so wholesome to me how the trans folks are such a huge part of what makes that sub awesome but also it's not a "trans sub", so you get all these people there for the memes also experiencing fully normalized transness
- I'm pretty sure neo-Nazis weren't the reason r/195 shut down. It was just that after 420 weeks the owners decided to end "the experiment".
  I wasn't on Reddit then though, so I wouldn't know.
- Huh! I knew a lot about r/196 in the present, but not its history! This is a good write-up
- to have a dorm room 195 seems implausible. it implies at least 95 rooms on one floor
What if I visit the community/magazine without posting? How do they know?
- The incident will be reported at /var/log/auth.log
- Straight to hell. To the boiler room of hell. All the way down.
- B.A.N.N.E.D.
  No, they don't know buddy, ha. It's meant to be a non-serious rule for a non-serious community.
- Santa puts you on the naughty list.
- Is it really worth the risk?
- The man knows. The man knows everything about you. They’re always watching.
- We actually made INGSOC from 1984 do it for us, we're very evil that way.
- I'm pretty sure I was banned from that community for 3 days for commenting then leaving without making a post of my own.
  But I'm not sure if they ban someone for silently visiting then leaving without posting.
Isn't it a rule to have rule in the title as well?
- It’s not, but it’s become sort of a de-facto tradition to cite the fact that you are posting because of the rule by adding the word “rule” cleverly (or, sometimes, not-so-cleverly) to the title
This is why I had to block them from my home feed. Way too many random posts that, because of the nature of the "rule", aren't very interesting.

Every Rule post, including this one, provides clues to the nature of the underlying RULE. Once somebody actually figures out what the RULE actually is, it is posited that the fediverse will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

Time to go down to the Grampy Store and get you your official belt onion.

As was the style at the time.
- rule? Did I do it right?

"I'm afraid to ask" is such a werid thing to say on the internet. Nobody knows you. Just ask.

Why does it hurt when I pee?
- Either an STD or you're doing it wrong.
- Could be dehydration or kidney dysfunction.
But he did ask, which is why it's even stupider.
- someone can be afraid to do something and still do it
- It wasn't actually a question, just a statement about a lack of knowledge.
It's just paraphrasing the quote from the show...

Just what were you touching that you ran out of touches? You need to see a doctor. Here, see a doctor:

rule

The very first community I blocked - let those who enjoy it do so but I do not. Unfortunately, the Fediverse shows you everything by default rather than things that you more or less want to, so blocking communities lacks the negative implications here that like blocking someone's phone or email address would elsewhere. So like if you want to block sports, you have to do so for every single team, league, and even type, plus all the new communities that continue to be made in the future. This is just the Fediverse's normal.

Unfortunately, the Fediverse shows you everything by default rather than things that you more or less want to
Uh no, that's a good thing.
- It "can" be, especially for those of us who want and even explicitly ask for such, but I was pointing out how the lack of tools to do otherwise removes it as a "choice". Being able to switch between modes at will would maximize our freedom and capabilities, but simply having things be this way bc nobody has yet built the tools to do otherwise does not make it the best option, only the default one.
A couple things. From my experience with Lemmy, you can subscribe to communities you want to see, the same way you could subscribe to subreddits. There's a subscribed feed, a local feed, and an all feed.
The way Reddit handled this is that there was a default set of subreddits that everyone would get. Things like /r/pics ... Whether you were browsing as a guest or as a user, by default, you could see that sub. I believe there was an option for "all" but nobody used it AFAIK. So you started with a small default (whatever Reddit thought you should see), and went from there. I'm sure, in more recent times on Reddit, it will also show you things that the algorithm wants you to see, either because Reddit is being paid to show it to you, or because it's adjacent to your currently subscribed subreddits.
Lemmy isn't substantially different when it comes to the subscribed feed, with one big exception: you don't really start with anything. So the subscribed feed is pretty bare, but the local feed is full of anything on the same instance as you are, and the all feed is everything that's local or has been brought in by federation. There may be some limits on this, for example, to NSFW stuff, but I'm not certain and it's likely up to the discretion of each Lemmy instance admin to make those choices.
The difference is in an exclusionary mindset vs an inclusionary mindset. Reddit follows an exclusionary mindset, eg. We're only going to show you what you say you want and exclude all others. Lemmy is more inclusionary, where you will see everything unless you say otherwise.
The same functionality exists here, like it did on Reddit, to only see what you're subscribed to, but you have to go and find what you want, subscribe, and then stick to your subscribed feed.
I've personally spent a lot of time on the /c/all feed specifically to find what communities I want to subscribe to so eventually, I can just stick to the subscribed feed. I'm not too the point where I think the subscribed feed has quite enough communities to keep me engaged, but I'm getting there.
The option exists and you don't need to block entire communities to get there, but you can use block for it if you want. There's nothing wrong with either methodology.
- Thank you for explaining this.
  I don't know what some people were assuming that I meant, but ofc I mean that I was browsing the "All" feed (what else could I have meant? well, I suppose "New" also, and ngl I do switch back and forth between those two, though spend >98% of my time on "All"), and that I wanted something in-between having to subscribe to each and every single thing individually, vs. EVERYTHING (with like a ton of sports, it used to be a bunch of foreign-language communities - which is... fine, I don't begrudge most any non-illegal community its entire existence? - and cooking, etc.).
  My own "Local" barely has anything, so perhaps that is a source of bias - StarTrek.Online has roughly 2 posts per day, if that; and Discuss.Online where I was previously was the same; and Kbin.Social where I was before that literally has no Local mode at all iirc!
  Anyway, to clarify, what I want is to start with inclusivity, then begin narrowing it down a bit - and all the better would be to use a toggle rather than a full ban, or even just limit the frequency of things so that e.g. I do not see 4 different posts about cooking from 4 different cooking communities in a row, followed by 4 different sports, followed by knitting, followed by... well, anyway, I just am not interested in scrolling endlessly to find even one thing that interests me, that way. This way I actually find TONS more posts than starting with exclusivity and trying to work upwards from that. (ironically, at the same time, it also misses many posts compared to visiting each community itself, but they tend to be the lowest-upvoted and commented-on ones; so anyway, it is what it is)
  But for some reason, most people here that are choosing to respond are arguing against that, citing how it "won't work" (I mean... I already do it, literally daily, and have been for months?), as if I am somehow trying to take something away from them, somehow, but I am just talking about curating my own personal feed, which works for me, until we can get something better going on.
  Also, there is the potential to be even more inclusive if the user has stipulated that they have a particular preference, when a community is new and struggles to gain acceptance in the wider Fediverse, the way that I am talking about. e.g. if someone says that they enjoy sports, and a new baseball community emerges, then it could be helpful to show up less often for people that do not like sports at all, but conversely more often for people who have indicated that they do - even if they have not subscribed to it yet. Sort of like how targeted ads work, except not being driven by seeking profits, and instead seeking out a genuine connection between a user and what content type they have asked to be notified about.
  Well, it's fun to dream. :-)
My blocked list is so long it's probably worth something.
- I highly notice its' absence, whenever I visit my old Kbin or discussonline accounts, and I see all these posts for sports, gaming stuff like Switch that I don't own, individual areas like in Canada and Australia and USA and UK - even if I lived in one I definitely do not live in them all:-) - and just stuff in general that fills up my entire scroll list with things that make reading it no fun and demotivating to have to decide individually on each one to skip.
  And we all - well, apparently "only" 99.98% of us - are this way:-). That's why one day I hope to see more general tools to deal with this stuff, e.g. if I specify that I don't want updates for "sports" then unless I specifically subscribe to a community, it will hide even newly created communities from me that fall into that category. One day...:-)
Been here since the redipocalypse, browse All daily... Haven't seen a single post about sports.
- I also am not seeing any sports stuff on /c/all. My block list is only some nsfw stuff and Star Trek communities (not because it’s not an amazing show, but because I’ve only seen two episodes and don’t understand anything.)
- Um... congrats, I guess?
  Though there are still location-specific communities on lemmyml, e.g. !india@lemmy.ml, that you may or may not enjoy wanting to curate into or out of your various feeds.
  But I am not trying to tell you how to live your life? I am just answering your question irt the fact that such posts do exist across the Fediverse. Perhaps you are not seeing them if nobody on your tech-focused instance has subscribed to any of those communities.
Missing the best Rule

Now all these f*ing zoomers are telling me that I'm out of touch!?

Oh yea? Well, your fucking phones are poisoning your minds, ok?

So when you develop a dissociative mental disorder in your late 20s don’t come crawling back to me.
- don’t come crawling back to m- I'm turning 30.
- it's 2020 and i'm thirty, i'll do another ten. then in 2030 i'll be forty and kill myself then.
- They won't. They'll post about it in one of their 30 online communities discussing it. Memes, medications, and moodswings.

You don't know what "rule" means? Ah, you're a fucking meat circus mate.

Deep cromulence.

how fleek.

It's the rule on !196 that your title must include the word

It's not a rule for us, just an injoke. The "rule" is post before you leave, not "every post must have rule". We also can't/don't ban people for not posting before you leave. We literally don't have that power at all, so we can't use it.
A rule that you have to have a certain word in a title or comment? That's the silliest idea I've ever heard. Main.