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?
I block all meme communities. It really cleans up the feed
Because it’s what people post? If that’s not your preference - which I can completely understand; I’d like more substantive content too - either post the content you want to see, encourage others to do so and / or block the communities or users that you don’t want to see content from.
encourage others to do so
I’m gonna post a meme to encourage people not to post only memes.
That’s the secret to all good communication: Speaking the language of those you wish to address.
Memetic self-subversion FTW!
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.
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
Heat rises and some memes are fire.
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.
I block most communities that aren’t mostly memes.
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.
I personally use Lemmy for 2 things really, tech/foss/privacy news & discussion, and as a social media replacement (memes). When I used to be on the crappy socials, I would only really use them for memes, and left when I started to care more about privacy rights. The very first community I followed was 196 when they migrated away from reddit, so it was essentially what I came here for initially, and then found that the whole platform was miles better for discussion as well.
The feed is simply a reflection of what people submit and engage with. You have two choices:
- block meme communities or communities that allow memes. This curates your own feed.
- make your own community and post the content you want to see.
It’s that simple
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, [email protected], then just search for it on your home instance, and if your home instance doesn’t know about it yet, it’ll tell your home instance about it.
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.
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:
-
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 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.
I asked a simple question and you are bringing in twitter and other stuff.
Translation: Please confirm my existing views in a manner I can comprehend. I haven’t the capacity to utilize nuanced helpful answers. Thank you.
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.
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?”
-
Yeah maybe. If you don’t want to see them just block them. Easy. Complaining about the frontpage here never change anything.
Some people can create shit-tons of communities
Usually people do that in the same instance, so you just block the instance.
The only memes I see are from meme communities, and I see a bunch of communities dedicated to thoughtful discussion, because I’m subscribed to them. I never look at the frontpage, I only look at my subscribed communities, and I’m only subbed to a minimal amount of meme communities. If I unsubbed from them, I wouldn’t see memes at all.
Also, the world is fucking dark and shitty. Sometimes people would rather make jokes about it than talk deeply about it because they’re trying to not go crazy and end up suicidal from facing too much darkness. Humor is often used as a release valve for painful subjects. Why not let the people who don’t have it in them to get into lengthy discussions just handle it in whatever way works for them.
The only memes I see are from meme communities
Meme communities predates the frontpage
Look, people have explained it to you several times in here and at this point you’re being purposefully obtuse. Go subscribe to non-meme communities, only look at your subscriptions, and maybe stop bothering people demanding they cater to how you want to communicate. Your life and experiences aren’t a universal experience, let other people be.
If the frontpage wouldn’t be filled with memes it would probably be more easy to find non-meme communities to subscribe to
Block the content you don’t like, blacklist users, communities and instanced you don’5 like and poof you have the content you like!
https://mander.xyz/communities?listingType=All&sort=TopMonth&page=1
I count 25 serious communities just on the first page of your instance showing all communities from all instances (37 on the second page). This is the primary way to find new communities, and it’s relatively simple to use, imho.
more than half of the most subscribed subs are meme subs.
You can also block individuals. As there are some idiots and trolls about.
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.
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”. “”"
Memes good.
Quick answer is that memes and shitposts get upvoted more than discussion, which is why it appears in your Hot/Top/Active sorted feed.
Look at my post history if you like. My top scoring ones are memes and the more discussion and text only posts tend to get only a bit of traction. I think the number of votes is also affected by how many people are subscribed, people cannot upvote it if they or their instance don’t see it.
If you want a “mostly discussion” feed with less memes and shitposts, try looking around for discussion focused communities (my local one is [email protected]), subscribe to a bunch and then make your default page the “Subscribed” feed. That way you can switch between what’s trending on Lemmy in general (All/Local) and what new posts are coming up with your realm of interest (Subscribed).
