Reposting from https://lemmy.world/post/24545370
Some other people had suggestions for other apps (such as Voyager) having built-in keyword filters, feel free to have a look at the original post
Why YSK: Certain topics are stressful and tend to spread all over the site, including to unrelated communities. Blocking communities can be overkill and ineffective, and likewise for blocking individual users.
To do so, open up the uBlock Origin dashboard, go to the ‘My filters’ tab, and add this filter:
lemmy.world##article.row:has-text(/word1|word2|word3|word4/i)
For example:
lemmy.world##article.row:has-text(/Trump|Elon|Musk|nazi/i)
Then apply the changes and reload any open tabs, and all posts which contain any of your filtered words will simply not show up.
You’ll have to change “lemmy.world” at the start to whatever your actual instance is. You can filter as many or as few words as you want, just keep the / at the start, the /i at the end, and separate words with | pipes. What’s actually being filtered is a case-insensitive regex, if you want to get fancy with it.
Here are equivalent filters for reddit and Ars Technica:
reddit.com##div.thing[data-context="listing"]:has-text(/word1|word2|word3|word4/i)
arstechnica.com##:not(:not(head>title:has-text(/^Ars Technica/))) article:has-text(/word1|word2|word3|word4/i)
As a disclaimer, I made these myself, and I’m not particularly familiar with creating uBlock Origin filters. There may be better ways to do this. Also the reddit one is specific to old.reddit.com, and the lemmy filter is made to work with the default lemmy.world web UI and may not work on other UIs without tinkering.
Yes, I know I’m just hiding my head in the sand
You could reduce your news consumption by 95%, and you’d still “know these things.” There’s no avoiding them - trust me, I’ve tried. Nobody is obligated to consume the sheer volume of news your average Lemmy user currently does. At this point, I’d practically consider it a form of self-harm. The only way to maintain anything remotely resembling a healthy media diet nowadays is by actively limiting your exposure to the overwhelming flood of information.
I’ve put a filter on the usual suspects directly within Voyager and I still see a crazy amount of it. My page isn’t completely full of it like it was, but it is drastically reduced while also letting enough in that I’m still keeping up with it.
I’m constantly contacting my politicians, protesting at every protest, and trying to fight facism every legal way that I can. This sucks, but I can’t afford to avoid news because it’s a bummer.
Avoiding news and current events is why we have such ignorant people, people not voting, and why we’re dealing with this shit in the first place.
I really wish there was a way to consume news in a daily update. This drip feed of often redundant chaos is exhausting.
Maybe newspapers were a good idea…
Well, hats off to you for at least doing something other too than just reading the news.