So firstly, you're gonna have to block communities left right and centre. Any news post – block the community.

Secondly, some apps let you institute keyword filters. Here are my keywords:

American  
EU  
Europe  
ICE  
Trump  
US  
conservative  
conservatives  
democratic  
democrats  
elon  
federal  
gop  
jd  
musk  
republican  
republicans  
senate  

I wish lemmy supported collaborative blocklists.

Unsubscribe from any news or political communities.

Block the communities, or use piefed since it has many more filtering options.

Maybe make two accounts? One for news and one for fun.

If you have an android, "Thunder for Lemmy" can filter based on keywords. I very much prefer the app over using my laptop and a browser.

https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/com.hjiangsu.thunder

If you still want to see news sometime, just subscribe to everything silly you want to see and only scroll on your home (subscribed) feed.

Don’t go on all unless you want to doom.

Or use piefed with the same strategy but use the dedicated feeds to sometimes explore news or other subjects.

Don't look at "all", just "subscribed", then subscribe to things you want to see.

Put in some block words and block some communities. On Voyager, you can do that pretty easily.

Aggressively block every community that has to do with news or has news posted to it. Then, if you're on a mobile app that supports keyword filtering, aggressively filter out every word of news you don't want to see. Then aggressively block users if they post or comment news you don't want to see. After doing that for a few weeks or months you'll start to see a normal newsfeed. But Lemmy is nearly unusable without it.

This is the strategy I use to avoid contact with a people group from a specific shithole country and it seems to work decent. Although there's always posts that sneak through the cracks.

Like someone else said: Block the news and politics communities if you like to browse /all. You can always unblock them later.

It was with heavy heart but I also blocked silence7@slrpnk.net. Nothing against them, and they post nothing but quality material in what I fully believe to be good faith, but they're just....too much. The only reason I had to block them individually is they post in more than just news/politics communities but never goes off-brand and only posts news/politics/"everything is a bummer" things. There's probably a few other people like that, but shouldn't be many.

That should just leave you with the few oddball posts where it's just the people that don't follow the no news/politics rules.

Here on MULTIVERSE there's a user settings field that lets you hide posts in communities with certain words in the name. Just put "news" in and you won't see any communities with news in the name. You can also block individual communities.

For more specific filtering, rather than an entire community, on Android i use Voyagers, which allows you to filter out specific keywords. On desktop I self-host Tesseract, which I think has the same functionality.

I'm using boost, you can add filters to everything you've subscribed to.

Lemmy really needs tags. Even without a tagging system like reddit a "NSFW" but for politics would help LOADS