I’m fairly new here and I’d like to use it more, but, there are a variety of general categories of communities that I’d like to never see. So instead of blocking them 1 by 1 as they pop up I’d like to have the ability to say “Block all communities that are sports related” for instance.
I realize the alternative is to look only at the ones you subscribe to but then how do you discover other communities that were just created without flipping back to Show Me Everything?
Lemmyverse.net. Or browse all periodically but infrequently enough that you don’t mind having unwanted posts there because your main feed is your subscribed feed and you’re just cruising for 20m looking for new communities.
I realize lemmy is smaller and it’s possible to do things here that don’t work on something as big as reddit… but… the futility of trying to block every subreddit you DON’T like because you might miss some that you DO like registers right? At some point in the lemmyverse growth curve the same thing happens here irrespective of what blocking tools you have. Eventually one must overcome the fear of missing out and just sub the communities you enjoy.
All that said, lemmy communities don’t have more general topic tags. The only tag that exists at all is nsfw, so there’s no way to identify and block all sports communities as a group. You either have to play whack-a-mole blocking each unwanted community as you notice it or switch to browsing subscribed and sub to each desired community as you find it.
I see what you’re saying. Lemmy isn’t as big as Reddit… but it’s still also somewhat huge for a mere mortal to play whack-a-mole on an individual basis. Let me paint a scenario. As I mentioned I don’t want to see “Sports” related communities. Cool. Theoretically I’d block a tag of “sports”. That’s basically saying I don’t want to see THOSE communities (a MASS whack-a-mole if you will).
But lets do the inverse a whitelist approach instead. I’m interested in Science, Art, and say Games. There’s no way for me to for me to subscribe to a topic tag either at this point to only show me stuff relevant to my interests.
Imgur, for instance, lets me filter in and out loads of specific tags from my feed (also specific use posts).
I guess I have the answer though to my query that it isn’t possible since there is only 1 tag so far and it’s for NSFW content.
It’s relevant to note that Imgur doesn’t have a communities/subreddits equivalent. Images are the rough equivalent of a post, and tags are the closest they get to communities. I’m quite certain that there are tags for both Art and Drawing, and following the Art tag doesn’t mean that you won’t miss out on posts that are tagged as a Drawing and not as Art. The result is really not that different than Lemmy, you still have to discover all the different tags you want to follow.
Not to be flippant about your tag examples, but those exact communities already exist (edit: ok, admittedly the search for art returns a bunch of unrelated junk):
Now, of course… those are not the only communities addressing those topics. There’s retrogaming as a subset of games, there’s photographyas a subset of art, etc. But as previously noted, that’s true of tags as well.
A whitelist based subscription method DOES work, and is implicitly what everyone uses on very large community sites like reddit and also very large tag-based sites like Twitter/imgur. Of course you miss out on some stuff, but when you find something you’re missing… you add it to your list. It’s ok not to find every last post you care about and doing so is an impossibility.