I would love to sometimes filter out any and all political posts, I think having this enabled as default on some instances would also be preferred by some users.
I’m a software dev, if it doesn’t require a lot of work I’m happy to make a Pull Request for this feature, but do people want this? Is there anyone I should maybe talk to before starting, or anything I should know?
Edit: I realise it won’t filter out ALL political posts, but even if it only catches half of the stuff, it could make the difference between being flooded with Trump/Musk news and not.
Some new users might turn away before knowing the can set filters etc. (which also aren’t perfect)
The ability to live a life without having to worry about politics is political in itself.
There are two races
White and “political”
What is extremely political to one person is just someone simply existing to another.
The term “no politics” in internet communities often actually means “only things that align with my politics”. I’ve seen it over and over again for as long as I can remember
The devs should make it so the political tag is enabled by default. If you turn it off, your post isn’t visible to other users. Because communicating with other people is politics.
It’s just a tool each instance can use as they see fit. It gives more options to people
It gives more options to mods, some of whom are people thag suck very much. Curate your own list of communities, instances and users.
There’s a number of problems with this.
It would only work if enough communities and instances adhered rigidly to similar editorial decisions about what is “political”. I don’t think that’s achievable.
Mods would have to do the heavy lifting in tagging/ untangling things.
It’s not going to be as simple to implement as you think.
Posts are already categorised by community. You can block the vast majority of political posts by blocking a few communities and users.
At times if filtered out keywords like Musk and Trump. You don’t really need to implement a feature for this. Just get posters to include a tag in the title of their post.
Looking at your other comments, you’re not going to be deterred by these criticisms, so my suggestion would be to find the git repo and create an issue to get some proper feedback from other contributors.
I’m going to pile on too.
No. Bad idea.
Crying ‘pOLiTics’ is the weak persons way of trying to steer the conversation away from topics they don’t want to talk about.
In the fediverse, if you don’t like a topic, one already has the feature they need. That is the ability to keep scrolling to find a topic one is seeking.
Quit whining about politics and avoid those groups at the party. Or do the personal work and figure out how to be a useful part of the conversation.
Don’t build your big tech bullshit into our fediverse. Curate your own communities and user blocklists.
What an odd take. We can filter out NSFW work so why shouldn’t we be able to filter other things we are not interested in or are contributing to our poor mental health.
I for one have filtered out Elon Musk and Trump because it is nauseating. If I’m in a headspace where I want to see them then I can remove the filters but generally I want to stop doom scrolling.
Then stop doomscrolling! The software is already baked into your noodle. Play with your cat instead or whatever.
I am sorry if you cannot process the current reality unfiltered but you have already identified the mechanisms to use to protect yourself.
The reason it is a dumb and abusable feature is that the word ‘politics’ is MEANINGLESS in this context.
Don’t like gay people? POLITICS! Do you like gay people? POLITICS!
A ‘politics’ tag is a tool for automating bulk censorship that YOU can and should be doing for yourself, manually. The entire point of the fediverse is that it bypasses that centralized mindset.
You decide what sort of politics give you heartburn and adjust your consumption accordingly. Outsourcing that decision making to others is morally lazy.
Then stop doomscrolling.
Said to someone with ADHD isn’t really something I was able to do without putting things in place to aid me to do that. The same way I couldn’t stop using Reddit all day until I got an app that locked me out of things after a certain duration.
You may do well to try and understand that not all peoples brains work the same and some people need more assistance than others to do things that seem easy.
saying it bluntly is helping… doomscrolling is the problem, and it might not be easy to fix but it is the actual fix
You would do well to stop blaming ADHD and assuming you are the only one who leans that way. It is an excuse for nothing, nothing at all.
Stop doomscrolling!
If you need training wheels, then get a set. You are basically advocating that all bicycles include them by default. That’s not a mindset that I can be quiet about.
We can filter out NSFW work
I have that turned on, and I heavily lean on blocking communities and users, and I still get NSFW shit fairly regularly.
I’ve been on Lemmy for years and have yet to see a single nsfw post.
I didn’t realize they even existed.
Maybe it’s not a Lemmy thing and it’s an app thing, but Voyager has a setting to hide NSFW content.
Maybe a general tag system, with community owners able to add tags that automatically apply to all posts, would be good? Otherwise there’s potential for special purpose tags like this to start piling up.
someone mentioned elsewhere, but worth repeating here i think: this already has a merged RFC and apparently someone is working on it
That’s a really good idea! Implementing that type of approach would account for accessibility, provides the each communities with options that individuals can use to curate their experience, and handles those factors while not blocking out or causing any complications with the wider fediverse.
This has been discussed before, and not just on the fediverse. It’s a bad idea because anything can be spun as “political” meaning rampant abuse.
I don’t see how it can be abused in a way it harms users though. Overusing it just means their post won’t be visible to many people, so abusing it just harms themselves. It would be abuse it they didn’t tag it, but that still would be an improvement compared to the current situation, and we could enforce a rule to ensure things that are political without a doubt gets tagged. (Eg: Mentioning politicians, ideas, etc)
Who decides what is “without a doubt”?
Everyone’s personal barometer is going to vary on that wildly.
The users and mods would decide that. Sure, mods can abuse it, but they already have the means to censor someone (ban users, tag their post as NSFW, delete their posts). I don’t expect it to be perfect, but it still would be an improvement, especially in communities that you would usually expect to be light-hearted, such as showerthoughts or mildlyinfuriating.
Many of the Lemmy apps support key word filters. I don’t think we need a political tag so much as filter support as a core Lemmy feature.
Might be potential for a web extension too - RES made Reddit significantly less shit; a Lemmy version of that would be outstanding.
LemmyTools did try, but development stopped a while back, and it’s pretty broken.
The keyword filters help somewhat, but can’t really be set as a default, and a lot of stuff gets through.
Why not both? Filter support would mean you’d have to update your list continuously based on current politicians and depend on certain words being used in the title/body.
A tag would still mean you’d have to depend on OP to select the right one (or perhaps on a mod to assign the right one), but at least the amount of variables would be infinitely less complex
My thinking is the reason the only tag available is NSFW is the first two words of that acronym: not safe. Open Lemmy in the break room and surprise! Your screen is covered in titties. The coworker sitting next to you complains to HR, and now your supervisor is explaining to you that exposing a coworker to sexual content without their consent is one of the forms of sexual harassment - which that facility has a zero tolerance policy for - so now they have to let you go.
Real consequences can come with NSFW content if it’s not filtered out in certain situations.
That kind of situation will never play out if you sub the word ‘titties’ above with Trump or Biden or whatever.
So, the urgency to tag NSFW content is high; the urgency to tag political content is non-existent.
Same with any other interest-based tag: I don’t care for sports or anime, which there’s a lot of both on this site. It’d be convenient for me personally to be able to just check a box in the settings to wipe that content from my Lemmy experience, but asking for that to be a core feature opens the can of worms of which topics get a built in tag, and which ones don’t. And even if we do that, whatever the result is won’t adhere to personal preference anyway, so let’s say they go ahead and add the politics and sports tags, but not anime: I’m still at back at square one needing a key word filter, and I’d still need to add key words for all three cuz without the need for a tag like with NSFW content, people won’t be nearly as diligent about tagging political, sports, or anime posts.
So imo just skip the mess: NSFW tag as-is, and customizable key word filter for the individual user to fiddle with according to their personal preference.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/rfcs/pull/4
If you want you can code it up already. The design is finalised but dessalines and nutomic have other priorities right now.Phiresky is working on it already. You can help them out if you want.
In spirit it’s a great idea but in practice it is nearly impossible to pull off and a fuckload of extra work for mods. Better to just curate your own feed. I’ve tried this and it might not be everyone’s cup of tea but I just log off socials when the shit gets overwhelming.
Don’t think it would be that much extra work, and each instance can decide how and if they want to manage it
If each instance decides on their own usage, then it no longer becomes a useful filter. We already see this with the NSFW tag (god forbid I ask for it to be put on a post showing the business end of a fleshlight hanging out the rear end of a stuffed animal dog, that isn’t nsfw apparently because it’s not real nudity or something).
From one coder to another: This is classic coder overconfidence. The complexity isn’t in the hypothetical code but in the people and how the feature may or may not be used.
Explodingheads is going to have a distinctly different idea of “political” than Lemmygrad.
The Fediverse has few enough daily users that you can block political communities and the people who post overwhelmingly political content outside of those communities.
You can also use one of the handful of clients that allow keyword filtering.
Everything is political. Where do you draw the line?
Up to each instance to decide
ignores politics
“Hey, how’d I end up in this gulag?”
I understand your frustration, but ignoring it is dangerous.
looks out their window at explicit fascism at a global high point unmatched in any period of history considering how unopposed it is
Oh gosh what if communists put me in jail for being a nazi 😱
Anyway, good for you not ignoring politics I suppose
Politically-engaged people were far more likely to.enter the gulag system, not less.
You think that’ll protect you?
From Stalin?
Keeping up with the congressmen is 99% a waste of time.
You’re attention is saturated with shit.
Nah. Agitprop is a core function of lemmy
It really needs a proper tag system
Community tags are in development already if I’m not mistaken
“Stuff in my feed I don’t want to see in my feed” is kind of the exact problem the Fediverse set out to solve. Nothing gets “injected” to a feed here so if you are seeing it, it’s a choice to continue to do so.
