Block anything that's not a net positive for you. Instances, communities, users, keywords, etc. You will start to enjoy the communities you do interact with more as they feel more relevant.

Another Lemming (I just made that up, what's the correct term?) mentioned how they blocked all the news communities and how it improved their experience. Until then I'd just been blocking individual accounts. I took their advice and blocked news, but also politics, communities about certain countries, and anything else where the default seemed to be activism/rage/hopelessness related. I actually agreed with the sentiments or causes of a lot of the communities I blocked, but I found that those actually hit me the hardest as I would get invested in them. All this blocking has helped a lot. Lemmy is a lot less heavy now. There's more humor and animals and less horrors. It's not that I don't care abotu bad things happening in the world, it's that I start to care too much while being powerless to do anything about it, and then I was no good to anyone, not even myself.

RIP RIF can't believe it's been three years

Same for the first thing, not so much the second. I curate my subscribed list and find that much healthier than all, and certainly healthier than the reddit front page which I hardly ever looked at.

Everywhere online is getting this way for me. I realized that it's intentional. The fascist take over of Twitter was a real tipping point. The fascist realized that anti-fascists congregated and connected online, so they started a full out assault on any place that has anything other than hardcore fascist ideology.
Also, the introduction of LLMs has enabled them to really slather on the insanity while making it more difficult to filter or ban.