what kind of posts do you want to see? as with any new network effect system we have to do the posting to seed it

how do I make my feed less depress

That's the interesting part of the "old internet", you curate your own feed.

Fediverse,Technology, and Privacy are chock full of all the news, and right now, there's a lot of negative going around.

Start by noticing who's posting in those forums and blocking the ones that are generally negative. We have a lot of bot posting that lays one way or the other. There's a Monday morning US time bot that just floods with the most depressing stuff. If you can't get it to sort out with that, start looking at other technology or news communities. Do the same thing there with blocking doom bots.

You can't pull Artax out of the quicksand, but you can keep him from sinking so fast.

Post to communities that are less depressing and get more things going

I found this too initially. What I did was (and this may not work for you but it's probably worth a whirl) only subscribe to easygoing / fun / quirky stuff for my "home" feed which I sort by "scaled" then bail into the top twelve hours of the "All" feed to keep up to date with what's happening in the world.

A quieter, pleasant home feed is a good start to your day.

Unsubscribe from technology that alones changes your feed by a lot

I struggle with this too.

At the moment I have a huge list of filtered keywords to exclude certain topics or words likely to appear in extreme content. It does cut out a lot of content that I don’t want to see, but doesn’t help with general negativity and doesn’t work with image posts.

I’m thinking of setting up my own filtering system with sentiment analysis, OCR and image classification so I can make my feed more balanced.

Do you have a gun and some conviction?

there are still some traditional forums around, relevant, and pretty much the de-facto global community hub, e.g. boardgamegeek.com

I'd say it's closer to forming clusters instead. Sure some groups may seem more hegemonic for being more incisive, but I can notice some splits in vision.

Got permabanned from reddit formoffering general safety advice to protestors in Minnesota in early 2025.

Fucking fascist racist piece of shit spez. May his guards be the first ones to defective during the apocalypse.

I wonder what this "general safety advice" was that got you banned…

Lemmy: the Methadone of Reddit addiction!

Don't people still use Usenet?

I never heard of it untill recently, some say it is still around.

To be honest I never really understood what it is.

Not just in magnetude, but it feels more evenly spread out too. Even communities/subforums that by other standards would be absolutely silent, if you post something, you may still get a reaction, like a comment, a thumbs up, a boost or crosspost, etc.

Honestly yeah. I do have a Reddit account, but I get way more responses and quality interactions here than I do over there anymore. Every comment over there is just someone trying to make a joke these days.

Priceless

Some cases of group think, even mob mentality at times, are a culture of the instance/instances of those involved. So if the user spots something in that line, blocking either the instance, or at least the users if instance blocking isn't available, can do wonders.

Isn't it the exact same with Reddit?