Same response as last time: I didn’t get it - I created it. I’m a self-employed contractor.

I’ve got one too!

Agree. Blocking / keyword based filtering is quite blunt tool. I’d much rather tell AI what I don’t want to see and have it analyze the content for me.

Samsung somehow managed to include removable battery, a headphone jack and SD card slot in the XCover 6 Pro while maintaining ip67 rating and a price of under 700 euros. I’m sure they’ll be able to figure it out.

That’s the thing - consuming anything even remotely resembling a healthy news diet requires actively avoiding most of it. Unfiltered news consumption means getting firehosed with information to the point of paralysis and depression. I wouldn’t be surprised if even a hermit living in the woods knows the latest about Trump and Musk. There’s no way to avoid hearing about them and who ever suggests you can clearly haven’t even tried.

Not everyone wants to spend their entire day reading about the politics of a country they don’t even live in. Have you considered that some people prefer getting their news once a day from a proper news outlet, and then spending the rest of their day focused on topics they’re actually interested in? That’s not “sticking your head in the sand,” it’s having healthy boundaries.

Lemmy doesn’t have a recommendation algorithm, yet our feeds are just as bad - if not worse. If your daily interest revolves around reading about U.S. politics, this might not be obvious to you, but for the rest of us, it’s painfully clear. And before you suggest “just avoid political communities” or “stick to your subscription feed,” let me assure you that doesn’t work. It’s not just political communities - it’s everywhere. I can’t even read articles about space without people injecting their opinions on the CEO of a certain rocket company. Even communities like microblogmemes are beyond salvation. If you limit yourself exclusively to communities where the “no politics” rule is actually enforced, you’ll exhaust new content within about two minutes each day.

My point is that the algorithm itself isn’t the sole issue. Algorithms can actually be helpful, provided you invest even minimal effort into training them. YouTube doesn’t bombard me with politics because it knows I’m not interested. Lemmy’s user base, however, seems so addicted to outrage that outrage inevitably dominates everyone’s experience here. If we measure the quality of social media by counting the “regrettable minutes” we’ve spent there, Lemmy would rank at the absolute bottom. Even Twitter doesn’t irritate me as consistently as Lemmy does. I’ve gone to great lengths setting up content filters to block politics, but even when half my feed is blocked, the majority of what’s left is still U.S. politics.

A little, but in the opposite way from what OP is describing.

I saw a second Trump term coming from a mile away. Not because I had any insider insight, but because I would have been genuinely amazed if he didn’t win and I place the majority of the blame for his victory on the left. They had four years to course-correct, but instead, they doubled down on the very things that made them lose the first time. So even though I didn’t want him to win, I can at least take some satisfaction in the fact that the people responsible for it are now pissed and got exactly what was coming to them. Their refusal to give an inch made them lose everything.

Grand visions of a utopian future are meaningless if you can’t even win an election. Trump’s ad campaign summed up perfectly where the left went wrong: “Kamala is for they/them - Trump is for you.”