Are different communities/servers really all that similar? I kinda just assume that people choose a somewhat random instance when they start and stick with it.
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
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Some are, some aren't.
Federation though, is such that if you say something one community doesn't like... well they are likely to come over from their instance and harass the crap out of you. Or if you random comment in their instance, they will lose their minds at you.
That’s what I did, because I didn’t know anything about how it works when I signed up. I guess the big ones near the top of the instance list are more random than smaller ones (reversion to the mean), but even there, mander.xyz users tone seems different to me.
Unfortunately, I think the same effect works both ways. The reasonable people you are seeking will mostly gravitate towards low-effort instances - after all, they are just looking for funny memes. They heard about lemmy as "reddit, but with fewer bots". They have jobs and hobbies and friends in the real world - all sorts of reasons to care about anything other than the specific instance of a random social media platform they are joining. It is no coincidence that the most tankie users on the most tankie instances oscillate between posting revolutionary content and posting suicide jokes. It will be the rare person who threads the needle of "reasonable enough to have real world perspective, but obsessive enough to create and manage a curated lemmy instance for reasonable people."
As a pretty middle of the road liberal with a few conservative or libertarian sympathies (but a lot of opinions about auto oriented city planning), I'm afraid we just have to wade through the muck until our communities appear via emergent design. Until then, I like the neoliberal comm.
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As someone said, you can block instances but it can be useful to look up an instance on fediseer. It shows endorsements and censures for the instance along with other information:
I find that the trick - or at least the idea - isn't to go out of the way to avoid such political discussions; it is to seek out spaces with some niche interest. Discussions would then naturally gravitate around the topic of interest, and political discussion usually doesn't make sense in such a space.
An example topic is anime. Most anime are not political in nature, so commenters in ani.social don't have the chance to go off-topic and discuss politics.
To use an analogy, let's say you are a picky eater. You are given some food (think soup, salad, etc), but one of its ingredients is something you don't like. Rather than try to pick out that one ingredient you dislike bit by bit (which can be tedious), how about adding condiments / dressing / etc to the dish? Enough of those and the taste would change, with the newly-added tastes having overpowered the one you dislike.
In terms of implementation, you basically have to curate your feed somehow. On Lemmy, the straightforward way to do so is to subscribe to topics / communities you are interested in, and participate in just those.
I see your point, and I did spend some time searching for the topics I enjoy, but let's be honest, there's not so much traffic. A bunch of niche communities have posts every 1-2 months. So naturally, however you sort, some of the more mainstream content (ie political communities, or political content injected in popular non-political communities) will show up in the feed. Which is not a bad thing in itself, but I just can't keep reading if the majority of comments are toxic.
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Schleswig-Hollstein
You know, OP is doing me a real service by posting this thread. I'm just scrolling down and blocking nazis right and left.
Nowadays reasonable is radical. Moderate isn't enough and conservative is poison
Reddit also died. It's now a museum piece of dead internet theoy.
Piefed makes it much easier to block instances.