Damn. I thought it was me, but scrolling through Everything & Top Day is just filled with rage bait and doom news. I rarely find something uplifting. And I usually find myself more anxious after reading through them.

I really want Lemmy to thrive, that's why I am here, but I used to be able to filter all that shit in reddit and still have a bunch of funny dumb simple happy posts. If I do that here I get no posts back..

Yep. To expand on this if people still want to use social media, here’s what helped me. The constant doom scrolling is unhealthy and unhelpful.

1. Block or mute news/doomsday communities/people on social media. Link aggregators and algorithm-driven social media just sucks for news across the board. Use Lemmy (or Reddit, etc) for memes, interesting discussions, cool pictures, whatever, but not news.

2. Collect a list of news sources you trust and add them to an RSS reader. Ideally in a separate folder from other feeds so you can easily filter them out when you aren’t interested in world news. You only get one “post” per article, rather than seeing the same “everything sucks now” article reposted to 20 different communities, and it’s buried in good ol’ boring news. Everything is less exciting in this format, it’s great.

Amen. OP, I promise the news still finds a way in, even if you swear it off. You won't be able to escape it completely, but shutting it out by choice makes a huge and positive impact. You don't need to be constantly pummeled with every bad thing that happens every day in order to still be plugged-in to what's going on in the world.