Don't have any instances blocked, but I block all the political, trans, furry, and mental illness communities. I wish people wouldn't post political stuff to the YSK or general memes communities, there are 5 million better places to post that on lemmy, but it's manageable.
Blocked furry and most trans stuff. A ton of the porn that littered my feed. That’s probably 75% of my blocklist. Many non-english communities, though I’ve kept a few to run through translators just to see what’s going on in other countries. Communities with high post counts of memes that spam my feed. Any /c with no interest in good faith discussion.
Mostly just sports communities. They tend to post a lot, and I just don't really care about sports outside of Motorsport. If Arsenal has some insane game, or gets a great player signed, I'll hear about it at work sooner or later, either from coworkers or a customer. I would say the only big sport that doesn't apply to between those played in North America and Europe is probably cricket, cause nobody has time for it. Then again, haven't seen a single cricket post, either.
I can stay current on what's going on with the NFL, NBA, MLB, Premier League, rugby and even hurling, just by showing up to work, so there's no real benefit to seeing it here, too.
Also, AI communities get blocked pretty much as soon as they pop up in my feed. The novelty of "Hah, that's crazy that a computer made this image" has long since worn off, and I have no interest in seeing the umpteenth iteration of some AI take on art or photography.
I don't have the option ticked to show nsfw content, and people have generally been good about tagging such content, so I haven't had to block anything there.
A spider community because I ain't about that life as an arachnophobic person.
A bunch of minecraft communities because I completely ditched the game after they decided that Java players aren't allowed to use adult words anymore on their private single player worlds and also because of the whole chat thing where all messages you send are linked to your specific account.
Entomology because I don't fuck with bugs.
A few different AI communities because I try to avoid AI if possible.
A community about dicks and dick pics. Not my cup of tea and I don't feel like seeing them on any feed since I don't blur NSFW images.
Those are just a few. The rest are minor things or other communities that are the same thing essentially, but on different instances.
I also have no interest in Linux, I have installed and used Linux around ten years ago. If and when I need Linux I'll just go to the mainstream internet or just unblock them and join. But for now no.
Have LꝏꝏꝏTs communities blocked , but noteworthy types :
Most (meme|shitpost|news) communities . Oversaturation from seemingly homogenous threadiverse userbase
(Meme|shitpost) content dœsn't lend itself well to conversations (which's what am here for) IMO . If I wanted those I'd just browse tumblr oar some thing
Prefer getting my news elsewhere
"(Cringe|Trashy)"-adjacent communities . Thankfully not many exist
All (.*)(girl|babe)s NSFW communities , don't like seeing photorealistic imgs of conventionally attractive women
As far's instances , only one can remember 🏧's hilariouschaos bcus TERF community on there I think
I browse mostly by All/Everything, and it's about an 70/20/10 split of non-English communities, sports communities, and anime communities respectively.
The non-English communities are typically on non-English local instances (feddit.org, feddit.nl, jlai.lu, etc), but I don't want to block those instances entirely because their users will still participate in other communities in English and it's not their fault that I just don't speak the language.
The sports communities are just because I don't typically care for that type of content. There are only a couple of sports I actively follow, and within those sports I don't need to see communities dedicated to each and every specific team, so I just block to filter the ones I have no interest in.
As for the anime, I actually do love anime, but a lot of them are communities for specific series I'm not into (which, if I'm being frank, are almost all just utter shit-tier waifu bait material), and others are very creepy "X"-moe communities which just make me feel gross when they turn up (and for those, blocking a single user was enough to get rid of 99% of that).
I don’t have any. I instead subscribe to as many communities I find interesting and set my feed to only my subscriptions. I rarely venture out to All and only do when I want to discover more communities.
This is why i think subject tagging for communities makes a lot of sense. I want to remove anime, k-pop, video games, sports, region-specific, tv/movie, “anarchy”/“everything sucks” and plenty of other entire categories from my “All” feed, but blocking is a never-ending effort.
The German ones who have the language set to English but only post in German. And the reason should be pretty obvious: They're assholes who are intentionally clogging up the feed of another language.
No instances, but I've blocked 868 communities so far. Either languages I don't understand or topics I'm not interested in... the vast majority of which being sports and anime/furry porn.
I've found I don't really subscribe to communities to see a feed of just those. I'd rather see EVERYTHING and curate the feed reductively. Kinda seemed sisyphean at first, but my 'All' is fairly personalized now, so I'd recommend that approach to anyone who browses All frequently.
Oh my god, soooooo many. An unreal amount of dreck here. The worst part is that I've blocked all that stuff and now it's mostly terrible world news. And so, to answer your question, no it hasn't made the experience here better. I guess my interests don't jive with the main niches around here.
Fuck cars, vegan communities, gender specific communities, cooking communities - because these types tend to be hard-line judgemental and fueled by hate (looking at you steak)
Mental health meme communities because they just post anything and say it's a trait of their condition. Does anyone else think about stuff? ADHD amiright?
Edit: oh and tHaNkSiMcUrEd because they just make fun of self help now
Anime art communities because there are so many and it's not my thing but I support their interests
Anything not in English because I can't read anything
Mostly porn communities that I dont vibe with or are what I would consider to be disgusting, like incest, sounding, and farting. Ive also banned a lot of furry communities, not because I dislike it but because its also a lot of porn. Anything AI is banned with prejudice. I have a lot of foreign ones banned but I realized I could just mute them instead, oh well.
Meme communities, anime, sports, furries, hexbear, moe, and tankie instances. I just block these categories to maintain All as a viable browsing option. I want to be able to subscribe to a limited array of communities while keeping up with trends and events.
Just checked and it's a whole bunch of nsfw ones (I don't block all nsfw, but there are a lot of weird communities in that category that I don't need to see), a bunch of German ones because they were taking over the feed at one point, and theonion (which I don't really find funny anymore)
Some foreign language communities don't seem to have their language marked so they still show up despite my language settings, so I blocked them to make things easier.