I blocked all of the news and political communities on my main account.

I keep an alt to keep track of local and national news of where I live. Improved my mental health substantially.

Edit: I live in Europe

Bullying someone who's country is at war with a dictator is bad, yes.

Trump is using a technique called 'The Gish Gallop.'

Obama wanted to pass the ACA and the GOP managed to block it for almost two years because Obama kept talking about that one thing.

Trump is breaking rules left and right; plus screaming about crazy ideas like buying Greenland.

There is so much stuff going on that normal minds just want to shut down to get some peace and quiet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

Just remember, this is the worst things have been so far. The Trump admin still has shovels in hand, it can get much, much, worse.

It's because political discussion (and in general most commentary) on Reddit / Meta / Xitter has become overtly censored, and there's a real concern that it's tracked - a bad thing in an authoritarian regime barreling towards facism. Those who wish to have real political discourse having been moving away, and lemmy is receiving a lot of that traffic.

As an example, referring to a list of CEO's on Reddit as "Luigi's List" will get you a ban warning for inciting violence.

This increase in sensitivity to the potential implications of real political speech, coupled with increasingly stringent rules on the parts of the mods and accelerated by the auto-mod bots and AI chat bots, has led to a very restrictive discussion environment on the big social media networks. Even Bluesky, which is left-leaning and possesses the architecture for multiple servers to avoid centralization, is following this pattern.

Lemmy / Mastodon are attractive because they're not as restrictive, when you're posting you're interacting with real people, and because the mods and admins are humans dealing with a manageable population. And if someone censors you on the server you're on, you just move to another. More and more folks are realizing this as the enshitification of the big 3 continues.

Fear not, the memes will live on, but I think that in a very real way, Lemmy's (and the Fediverse's) time is upon us, and this is the result. People are using it for real shit because the real shit is upon us, and we need a place where we can freely discuss how to get clear of the incoming shitstorm.

News should always take a higher seat than memes. I don’t know why this is considered abnormal. For ages, the front page of ALL newspapers paper have been news. Not the comics section.

Real political discourse is too heavily censored in corporate spaces

Feels like it's been that way since the election to be honest

Lemmy has always been a political outlet, but post election has been out of hands.

OP is onto something.

maybe people are getting sad out there. maybe news is coming at us fast.. because change (unprecedented bad bad change) is happening faster than ever before?

it's a sign of the times. people blaming news junkies or whining about blocking comms don't get it. we're no longer living in a time when we can afford to ignore what's happening around us.

ps, I'm not arguing against memes. in fact go check !conservative@lemmy.world it's been turned into a satire comm under new mods and it's wonderful!

What happened?

People pay attention to memes more than news...

I blocked all the stupid meme communities as soon as I started using Lemmy, glad to see actual discussion is replacing brain rot tho.

It's a good thing.

i was just thinking this.. it used to be 80% memes and now its just the downfall of western society. depressing.

It's not just Lemmy either. Every platform is looking like this. At least people have woken the fuck up.

I haven't seen any egg pics. Something is wrong, I can feel it.

(But yeah, things will never quite go back to the way they were, nor would we want them to exactly.)

I actually saw some news bleed into shitpost the other day. It's that bad.