edit: having a community dedicated to letists only can be a bad idea in that it can make sure your beliefs are not questioned. I have thought myself as a socialist and I have thought myself as a anarcho-capitalist, I don’t believe in either anymore. I think if radical views go unchecked they might cause problems. Although I am a capitalist now, being confronted by socialists has made me aware of capitalisms deep flaws. When I considered myself a communist (17 year old me) I thought opposing views really changed my mind. So that’s the ideologically diversity I am talking about.
I love the outlook of lemmy, I think the design is decent and simplistic. But one thing I can’t seem to get over is the fact that almost everyone here seem to think the same politically. Why do you guys think this is?? I know this is a community of leftists foss enthusiasts but I hope everyone here is aware that it is driving many people away from adapting it.
A community of leftist privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers
I know you already mentioned this, but… should an online car community be concerned about the lack of cyclists on their forum?
love the outlook of lemmy, I think the design is decent and simplistic. But one thing I can’t seem to get over is the fact that almost everyone here seem to think the same politically. Why do you guys think this is?? I know this is a community of leftists foss enthusiasts but I hope everyone here is aware that it is driving many people away from adapting it.
Hehe… good one. I understand that. But don’t you think it would be a better place of some people from the right joined in here
Holy shit no, Jesus Christ, I like this place because I don’t get called slurs. How could you possibly think that’s even worth saying?
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I’m a “tankie” you fucking idiot. Maybe if you stepped outside and touched some grass you would realize that Marxists were the most dedicated feminists the world over. I’m not sure how many women you’ve had a chance to see in real life though, so I can’t fault you for it.
For someone who was a “socialist” at one point you really seem to not understand much about the world or socialism. Maybe you don’t understand what you’re talking about and your terminally internet diseased brain is making you think you can just use labels with no meaning to try and seem smarter than you’ve actually put in the work to become
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There is https://wolfballs.com/ as a Lemmy instance that is more right-leaning and you are always free to host your own.
“Centrism” isn’t really a position one can have… what you mean is “in support of the status quo” which is IMHO also right leaning as it is inherently conservative.
The recent influx of Genzedong users definitely lowered the discussion quality here, but beyond those lemmygrad.ml users there is actually quite some ideological diversity in the Lemmyverse. Maybe consider signing up on an instance that does not federate with lemmygrad.ml 🤷
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It’s hard to balance it, especially with external factors. I think a particular issue is that, in my experience, most of the people seeking ‘free speech’ platforms are those who get banned from other places. And that also plays into the platform audience: I honestly believe you tolerate a very wide range of views on the platform, but the userbase and culture will lead some groups of people to like the community and others to dislike it. Contrast somewhere like gtio.io which (currently) doesn’t have a monoculture of narrow political views, with conversations about pro-communism, racism, age-of-consent and both “left” and “right” libertarianism existing in the same place, but they are not ‘free speech’ site at all: they explicitly enforce civility, for example. You won’t get racists or tankies other exclusionaries spamming mindless insults and slurs to dissuade people who don’t want to be around that, pushing the community in one direction and leading others to find more comfortable spaces. Hatred is a price of free speech, and one that keeps most less extreme people away, and leads the most popular in-group to near-monopolize. A Muslim would probably leave Lemmygrad or Wolfballs pretty quickly, but the de-facto in-groups would feel welcome, regardless of moderation and platform censorship.
I am curious as to why you say free speech would be better without anonymity: anonymity removes reputational and (significant) social filters that lead to self-censorship or harassment. Anonymous imageboards have been infamous as free speech havens, even the ones with significant censorship. That said, they have added moderation hurdles with commercial spam, illegal content and ban evasion.
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“Centrism” isn’t really a position one can have… what you mean is “in support of the status quo” which is IMHO also right leaning as it is inherently conservative.
This is why we need more diversity of thought
Those rules apply to lemmy.ml, not to lemmy as a whole. For example, I’m in sopuli.xyz, and these are its rules.
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I know, is there a lemmy look alike for idk centrists and for everyone else? I just created a voat account and was surprised by what I saw on r/askvoat. https://www.voat.xyz/viewpost?postid=626ee17071e64
I would choose lemmy anyday over that shit
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I am actually a supporter of Trump’s policies, although he is not fit to lead US after Jan 6. not a fucking racist like those folks at voat. I wonder what brings that out. That site makes me puke. Thanks for the reply tho. My respect for Lemmy greatly increased after visiting voat.
although he is not fit to lead US after Jan 6
Jan 6 didn’t just magically happen in isolation. Trump, through his public speeches, actively encouraged ideas and theories that lead to that. Jan 6 was merely the result, to think of Jan 6 as a thing he and a few thousand people woke up and did one day is not a useful way of analyzing how to avoid it happening again; preventative treatment is the most effective.
I wonder what brings that out.
A bunch of things. Modern Republicans appeal strongly to anti-progressivism (to paraphrase, “we resist the woke leftist socialism of the politically correct Democrats!”), engage in STRONG patriotism and nationalism (keeping “the Mexicans” out) and more so some things like “good people on both sides” and failing to denounce the rise of white nationalist terrorism (intentionally or not) act as dog-whistles and tacit encouragement, so naturally those racist crowds flock to him. In the false binary of Democrat and Republican, their choice is obvious. That clearly doesn’t mean ‘Trump supporters must be racist’, but it’s absolutely no surprise those millions of people flock to him.
Of course, that doesn’t mean Biden is good either. He’s also absolute shit, along with approximately the entire Democrat party (protip: most of the world would consider them center-to-right wing in that dumb left-right spectrum, apart from a couple of small social progressive policies). The electoral system of the US is ineffective, and it’s no surprise people are turning to radical groups in all directions in the past few years.
Trump, through his public speeches, actively encouraged ideas and theories that lead to that. Jan 6
I agree and I felt sad that he did that. He was indifferent or positively ecstatic about the consequences of his speech. He put himself above the nation.
engage in STRONG patriotism and nationalism (keeping “the Mexicans” out) and more so some things like “good people on both sides”
Again, I do think merit based immigration is a good thing, so as long as they want that I am not against them. (thank for the answer, I understand your point broadly. )
Lemmy the platform is diverse, lemmy.ml is not, but it doesn’t pretend to be. Did you look at the list of instances on https://join-lemmy.org/instances when choosing which one to join?
I guess it depends on the type of content do you want to engage in and what type of political discourse are you looking to engage in. Exploding-heads.com and wolfballs.com might be options, and beehaw.org has a politics section if you feel the need to engage. Also consider what instances the server blocks via the instances link at the bottom of the page when visiting.
Personally id love to see generalist instances push political discourse to gotalkitout https://gtio.io/c/politics which is a instance dedicated to discussion and currently does not block any instance.
I think the generalist ones like gtio.io are a solid idea, providing a mixing pot. That said, hope it doesn’t get a culture shock and become the classical ‘free speech’ case where it’s mostly just populated by people who feel censored elsewhere.
I also like the concept of ‘no politics, no exceptions’ communities, where that is appropriate (e.g. cat pictures). If I want serious politics, I’ll go to a political discussion community instead of seeing people shoehorn their agenda into comments.
me too bruh!
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I’m going to paste my comment from a similar topic:
I find that conversation flourishes when you limit it to a certain degree. In spaces which are completely open and have a massive range of opinion, what you’ll find is mostly yelling at each other over broad talking points that everyone is already familiar with. After a while, nothing of interest comes out of the far left clashing with the far right all the time. But when you limit it, time can be spent doing other things than yelling at the dickhead on the other side who you have little to no overlap with and see as a dire enemy. You can talk about nuances in principles, differences in organizing, etc. It makes for richer, more interesting conversation.
There’s also quite a huge range within the umbrella of leftism, and honestly we already have a huge enough gap there that there’s a lot of worthless clashing. Broadening that would only make the site worse.
Just tell me why lemmy.ml should necessarily be ideologically diverse? To be in permanent chaos and useless fights? I think there is already plenty of such platforms…
You might be right, I do understand your point. Healthy disagreement is not alive anymore. But I think having a community dedicated to letists only can be a bad idea in that it can make sure your beliefs are not questioned. I have thought myself as a socialist and I have thought myself as a anarcho-capitalist, I don’t believe in either anymore. I think if radical views go unchecked they might cause problems.
better to learn than simply believe ;-)
You’re missing an essential part: Marxists are the only ones who can view society in a scientific light. It’s like being frustrated that everyone on a community knows so much about a topic, it doesn’t really make sense to be frustrated about. What, when you say something dumb are people too happy and fast to correct you? If you want to feel smart start interacting with YouTube comments, if you want to learn then maybe understand what the actual diverse viewpoints here understand about the world.
I understand what you are saying. Echo Chambers are absolutely dangerous.
People need to be exposed to views that don’t necessarily align with theirs. That way they can expand their viewpoint.
Having said that, this is just one site among many. Not every website has to hold multiple views. Taking the internet as a whole, there are a variety of websites that people can get differing opinions and viewpoints.
Now that I think about it, it sounds good in theory but I know many far-right people that don’t attempt to look for alternative sources. They just keep delving down the same Rabbit Hole instead of looking for differing views. So you might be on to something.
Ultimately, Lemmy is a Reddit clone and one problem with Reddit-like platforms is the upvote/downvote system heavily promotes groupthink since dissenting opinions are downvoted into oblivion while consensus opinions are promoted. Lemmy attempts to solve this problem by being open source, self-hostable, and federated (which are all great things), but these aspects alone can’t totally solve the inherent groupthink problem, it just makes it easier for those with differing views to spin off and start their own instances, which will likely have their own groupthink.
As politically centrist myself, I’ve basically just unsubscribed from the political communities and focus on the more tech-related ones. If an apolitical or more centrist political Lemmy instance which federated with lemmy.ml was started there’s a good chance I’d join.
Same. I thought to myself there are better things than politics to focus on. But yes, groupthink is a problem with such platforms.
It’s an interesting point, but what’s the alternative? Activity-based ranking like forums and imageboards might be appealing, although it is worth acknowledging they naturally bias towards controversy, for better or worse. Probably worse for a ‘centrist’, which is a relative non-term but I assume it means pro-status quo liberalism who doesn’t like radical ideas.
You can actually set that up on Lemmy’s front page (not comments) by using that New Comment sorting, but that’s not a default anywhere so its not relevant unless an instance chooses it as a default.
Anyway, groupthink is an interesting problem in the case of recuperation and ‘sanewashing’ of ideas. reddit’s /r/antiwork is a prime example: it was initially anarchists who wanted to abolish the concept of work (not necessarily labor) as we know it, but it became popular and reddit’s pro-capitalism pro-liberal groupthink got to the point where their founding(?) moderator’s views, congruent with the resources in the sidebar, caused massive outrage. Like you said, dissent and discussion is overwhelmed by funny memes and fulfilling anecdotes.
I agree that pointing out the problem is far easier than finding a good solution. I don’t think activity-based sorting is much better since, as you said, that just tends to promote the most outrageous content. Facebook and Twitter-like platforms suffer from that issue more than Reddit-like platforms do. In short, I don’t have a good solution and I acknowledge the benefits of the upvote/downvote system (such as outrageous and irrelevant content being filtered out by the community without the need for as much active moderation), but it is a poor tool for fostering civil, ideologically diverse communities.
this instance may not be, but the fediverse is. that’s kinda the whole point.
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I think the problem is that there does need to be a certain amount of anti-establishment to even be interested in a place like Lemmy, there don’t tend to be a lot of anti establishment centrists (those who call themselves as such are for the most party just rightwingers).
While I do agree that ideological diversity is good, one does need to be careful when trying to enact it because you might end up with a place like r/polititicalcompassmemes (though that particular cesspit is probably a different thing entirely).
The main issue when it comes to spreading FOSS alternatives to big tech is that how interesting a social media space is is almost directly related to how much activity there is on it, to be frank there really isn’t much going on here. How we get people to show up and adapt it for themselves is that we ourselves be more engaged in it and spread the word elsewhere off-site
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Why should growth be a primary goal in a topic-specific instance?
Of course growth is necessary for suvival and slow growth (or strong growth with very strong moderation) is healthy for a community, and I personally am able to be civil and tolerant of even extremely divergent ideological beliefs, but why should this place compromise its stated, explicit values just because it’s popular? I don’t see it as an issue at hand if people like this thread creator feel uncomfortable on lemmy.ml, the issue is that they are not aware of other instances (or are just being petty about not being welcome in the largest ones and think the world needs to change for them; I’m not accusing but I do see it a lot).
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There is no compromise to its values with tolerance
Not inherently, but I would argue that a minority viewpoint tolerating a contradictory mainstream view leaves it open to dilution, compromising its values.
Take /r/antiwork on reddit. How did it go from being radical anarchists against the concept of work as we know it, into a place where a founding moderator talking about those same beliefs in an interview makes their overwhelming majority feel embarrassed? A rapid rise in tolerated but unaligned newcomers progressively pushed the window of popular values away until the community’s stated values were undeniably compromised by the majority of users.
I do think that, similar to what you said, a big issue is a misconception that lemmy.ml is somehow the only instance or the official instance. It is annoying, especially when occasionally someone uses ‘Lemmy’ to refer to lemmy.ml.
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In the context of federated communities, I am not against such monolithic communities existing.
That doesn’t mean every community must be monolithic, or even should be monolithic! I’m actively involved in some communities that clearly benefit from not being monolithic, aiming to be those open societies that you referred to, because that’s aligned with their purpose. But for others, not being monolithic is anti-productive or even an existential threat for smaller platforms. This is especially relevant for niche communities that face outside attack or sudden infamy. If a platform is about a specific topic, and there are popular alternative places for people who won’t productively discuss that topic, I see no harm in omitting them from that group.
For some communities, like social groups, evolving makes sense and is compatible with its purpose for existence. However, if the direction of the community is driven suddenly by an influx of naive new users and the direction contradicts the sole purpose of the community, I fail to see how that’s not a harmful thing. It’s recuperation. If, for example, I start a small community of hundreds to discuss how society could benefit from not being designed around cars as a primary mode of transport, and it fosters constructive radical innovation on urban design principles that are valuable to society and case studies on how cities benefit or lose from redesigning transport, but then after making a news headline quickly becomes flooded by a few thousand naive progressives who soon shift the main topic of the community to be shallowly talking about news of cars becoming more ‘green’ and how to improve roads and cars and how electric cars are so much better for the environment than regular cars and dogpilling anyone who criticizes improvements in car design, then I see that as a travesty. There was a niche platform that enabled advanced, radical discussion without distraction, suddenly replaced by a pool of shallow circlejerking that, hooray, more people can feel welcome in, but now is nothing special or useful to society. That community didn’t evolve, it was replaced and removed. That is a loss to the greater open society that the focused community is a subset of. The open society thrives on diversity of opinion and allowing that diversity to foster into developed ideas instead of being smothered by the status quo.
Lemmy and lemmy.ml explicitly have different purposes. lemmy.ml’s purpose is not aligned with making every redditor feel welcome. Welcoming everyone would contradict its topic and hinder specialized discussion with distractions.
Lemmy, on the other hand, is more aligned with making every redditor feel welcome. It is the broader society that lemmy.ml is a subset of. I am not in favor of Lemmy being monolithic. I am in favor of lemmy.ml sticking to its broad but non-mainstream topic, and if you want to call that monolithic, then so be it.
I don’t want more right wingers to join because I don’t think they have much useful things to say (I think this as a former right winger) but I do think there is diversity beyond the left and right spectrum that would help lemmy some.
There’s not a lot of women here. There’s not much stuff related to hobbies outside of tech. Politics is heavily driven by the ML context of the broader lemmy community. I’d love to see some discussions of social democratic policy stuff, not because I think it’s better but because there’s only so many times you can listen to people rehash Das kapital in the comments. What about some MMT stuff? What about liquid democracy or people experimenting with holocracy etc?
I think there’s more women on the lemmygrad instance, at least in my experience.
Second follow up - There is a good question here in that you want to engage on the lemmy platform, but did not necessarily land on the right server. I note that if you try to sign up on lemmy.ml it states at the top of the sign up page Before you register on lemmy.ml, please have a look at Joinlemmy to see if there is an instance that better fits your region, language or interests. Did you look at this page or go past and quickly jump on to see what things were about. Did you look at the content posted on lemmy.ml before deciding to join?
What should be an approach for this alleged lack of diversity? Lemmy is an open platform where everyone can join, not restricted to any personal characteristic, and assume the identity that best matches them.
So, IMHO, there is no problem to solve.
