OpenStars
Great addition - I just wanted OP to be aware of what is possible, like if you continue to get notifications for multiple weeks after mistakenly making a comment on Chapotraphouse that didn't bash Biden hard enough and then cease responding anymore yet continue to get those notifications daily... you don't have to leave the entire Fediverse, it is possible to just separate yourself away from that source of (nonconsensual) noise.
But the further away you stay from politics communities(and news, and memes, and maybe other popular ones), the less controversial content you have to deal with. Many communities are outright tiny, and most (numerically anyway) I would wager are very non-toxic, and even friendly. But the bigger ones are worth a warning imho.
I don't mind explicitly political news, or even actual political communities, but nonetheless I feel you there bc when a community like memes explicitly asks to not include political matters, but then it gets inundated with political themed non-memes, it is highly annoying to see how little consent actually matters.
Whatever a community sets out to do, the rules should matter to people, but sadly there are a very large number of those for whom consent means nothing, apparently, only what they can get away with bullying a moderation team into accepting.
I kept switching instances - first as Kbin.social stopped working and then due to extreme slowness and connectivity issues at others - so I found it easier to block whole instances than individuals. That leaves me unable to communicate with some people on those instances who might be worthwhile, but that is a trade-off that I am willing to make since I found the interactions with people on those instances overwhelmingly negative, as in I would rather have left the Fediverse entirely than have to put up with that, though now that instance blocks exist I am glad to have that option instead:-).
I think Reddit is more exclusively USA-focused, with side-notes of UK and others, whereas Lemmy is more global. Therefore in Reddit that was more left-leaning than rightwardly so you mostly saw divisions between like young people vs. older ones - e.g. should a downvote be for something you don't personally like or something that does not add to the conversation.
Like if someone submitted a guide for how to fix a toilet (to a let's say home fixing sub) and it started to go viral then would you downvote it bc you don't want to see that in your r/popular feed, or upvote or leave it alone bc it at least matches what it set out to be? Which really reflected the slide of the platform away from its roots as a forum board and into true "social media", where interactions are monetized and hence the more the better, never mind that more downvotes leads to less people willing to submit actual content.
Although that's over now, as the social media aspect won, so it's all just that now, and therefore for most of us here, not worth visiting any longer. i.e. if I left the Fediverse, I still would not return there.
But here, I think it's your block list, because I see a HUGE diversity of opinions. e.g. there are (a few) right-wing conservatives who actively support genocide so long as it is their own side doing it, and there are extremist left-wing tankies who also actively support genocide so long as it is their own side doing it, and too there are blue maga who soft-core support the doing of genocide so long as it is their side that needs to win, plus there are a few who even don't support genocide, imagine that. :-P
I see a lot less of those extremes though after blocking hexbear.net, lemmygrad.ml, and finally I added Lemmy.ml. Also, while places such as [email protected] exist and are active, they are tiny.
Unless you are already retired, and often even then, for you personally it has an extremely good chance of getting better, even if only slightly. More life experience often translates into ability to convert new things heading your way into less suckiness. Pro-Tip: lean into that for even better results - get married, or perhaps divorced, ditch Windows if you haven't already, etc. Don't let life pass you by - enjoy it!:-)
But the trajectory won't be as high as it would have been previously for someone a few years ago, and for all of us overall that trajectory will be objectively worse. Especially minorities bc fuck them all, apparently - says the Leopards Surely Won't Eat My Face Off party. Oh well - anyone who thinks life is supposed to be fair hasn't been paying attention (especially since the late 70s with the advent of corporations that can shirk legal duties that the rest of us cannot, like they can die and in so doing offer massive payouts to the board members at the expense of the customers, etc.). On the other hand, as the suffering increases comes the possibility of finally waking up and doing something meaningful - apes together strong. In the meantime, refer back to the first paragraph, for now.
Use the block button early and often if you value your sanity. Some people exist in the Fediverse solely to fuck up others' day. Some entire instances almost seem dedicated to it even, or at least I can see no functional difference from where I stand. Reddit doesn't have instances, so that part is new, but it's not hard, it's in your settings -> blocks -> scroll down to instance. Doing this can improve your experience here by like 99%. You'll discover over time which ones you want to block.
Thank you for the insight, I was wondering e.g. if changing the title of a cross-post would disable notification that it was a cross-post, but it sounds like not.:-)
iirc, it was one of the points sold to people as we migrated away from Reddit during the exodus. But I like your more precise phrasing of what it actually is.:-) More was told during the exodus though, e.g. "just as Reddit is falling, if the instance you pick likewise falls, then you can move your account to another one", i.e. it barely matters which instance you picked at first, so just jump in and see. But different language may have been used at different times and places - e.g. the expectations of people already here vs. the newly incoming ones (like me:-).
Anyone using the "cross-post" feature is doing things properly, so don't worry, the person you responded to just left that part out. They might be on an extremely old app that hasn't been updated to handle that feature - but you are good. Thank you for caring...and sharing:-).
You cannot defederate from a "community", but you can have your specific user account block either a community or an entire instance (to varying degrees of effectiveness - you can still see posts from people on those instances, and chat with them, but you won't receive "notifications" from them anymore).
Defederation from an "instance" is meant as a last-resort effort to avoid an enormous amount of moderation work, like if it keeps sending child porn across the Fediverse, or users are overwhelmingly harassing others or something.
Here, you can read about such occurrences directly from the sources involved (who chose to do it) like https://hexbear.net/post/1712067, and then various responses in return like https://programming.dev/post/2652745 (tldr: hexbear defederated from them, so they defederated in return to avoid people getting confused from one-sided conversations where messages could be sent but never received) and https://lemm.ee/comment/2155764 etc.
And yes, you are stuck at your current instance if you care about keeping your account. You can copy your rules like block list from one user account to another though, like I have an alt at StarTrek.online, which mitigates somewhat the pain of having to move. If someone were to try to send me a DM at my old one though, I would not get it at the new account - instead I would have to keep both active, forever. It turns out that the idea that you can move freely around the Fediverse was a lie - or at least, it is something that isn't fully implemented yet. Theoretically it is something that could be done, if someone were to bother to implement that, but it hasn't been done yet.
All of Lemmy is still beta software. It helps to lower expectations:-). It is still 1000x better than Reddit imho, b/c of (a) no ads and lack of other forms of enshittification as well (e.g. automatically playing videos that you cannot stop with a setting somewhere), (b) the people are more worth talking to here (generally speaking; except those places that tend to be defederated by the major instances, b/c of all the harassment they kept doing).
Try DuckDuckGo - I believe its selling point is that it is not as bad as Bing.:-)