Technology

Lemmy’s user base, however, seems so addicted to outrage that outrage inevitably dominates everyone’s experience here.

Ye-es, people look for outrage. Especially people who left mainstream platforms because of outrage. We don't have gladiator fights today, so the wish for murder should be vented out differently somehow.

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.

Right, and wouldn't it be much more convenient to block posts and users and whole communities by regex and logical rules?

Say, post title contains anything "federal" and "government" like - kill. Post content contains something about voting - kill. More than one third of comments involves political jargon - kill. The resulting kill score is measured against threshold.

But of course that would make communities and instances and moderators as they exist now much less useful. That would transition us back to Usenet in some sense. People don't want to give up that kind of power, even unconsciously they'll resist. When they are a community mod and everything about its climate depends on them, it's different in prestige from them just cleaning up obvious abuse, and the climate depending on individual kill rules set up on clients.