Hi, not sure if this is the right place for this, but - I come to slrpnk.net to talk with people about solarpunk ideas and actions, but my dash is frequently filled with endless news stories. If I wanted to read upsetting news, I would… go read the news. Climate in particular has almost no discussion about climate change or actions we can take and only news articles. I’ve been thinking of blocking the community so that I don’t have to sift through news stories to get to posts by members of our community. Does anyone else feel like this?
(Note: this isn’t to say that I’m ungrateful for the folks sharing the news articles. I do appreciate it! I just feel that for myself, I’d rather focus on the possibilities that solarpunk has and human connection with others in this movement.)
PieFed offers these fantastic categories of communities that helps me with this aspect of the Threadiverse. Like since https://piefed.social/f/news exists, I could in theory unsubscribe from all the News communities, thereby removing all of that content from my Subscribed feed, yet still be able to access that entire category at the touch of a button. (In practice I only subscribe to a few more selected ones, leaving the most toxic ones behind.)
On PieFed.social, there is also https://piefed.social/f/memecommunities, and https://piefed.social/f/linux, and https://piefed.social/f/television - but note that these predefined selections (by the instance admins) are not constraining in the least, since they are also user customizable and even shareable! So you could generate a finely-tuned selection of communities, then everyone could benefit from your labors (or likely someone already has what you want?).
This is a UI matter though, so I don’t know if it would be compatible with your current 3rd-party app or choice. But at least in a web browser - I use Firefox on Android - it works perfectly, and has done so for a year.
PieFed.social has access restricted to only account-holders right now (an unfortunately necessary bot defensive technique), but without needing to make an account you can see how these Topic areas work on piefed.zip, e.g. https://piefed.zip/topic/cats, https://piefed.zip/topic/gaming, https://piefed.zip/topic/privacy, https://piefed.zip/topic/programming, https://piefed.zip/topic/science, etc.
For me these 100% change the browsing experience for me, as compared to Lemmy! Also you can receive notifications for pretty much anything - a user commenting, a community posting, or even STOP receiving notifications for your own content (impossible on Lemmy), so for low-volume or high-importance content (e.g. a community that you help moderate?) this helps so much. Check it out! 🤓