• Arthur Besse@lemmy.ml
    233·
    3 years ago

    It is fascinating to me that you refer to this site as an app. If you wouldn’t mind, I have some questions:

    • Approximately what year were you born?

    • What app are you using to access lemmy?

    • What constitutes an “app” in your mind? Do computers have “apps” or only phones?

    As to your question: everything is political :)

    • BlackLotus@lemmy.ml
      6·
      3 years ago

      Ha, the “what year you were born?” question is pretty funny. I think it’s probably accurate that many younger people identify websites as “apps,” but software engineers like myself also sometimes do that. It’s just a change in the vocabulary that probably doesn’t propagate to older folks who aren’t in the industry. Although my uncle is in the industry as well, and I think he, too, would balk at the notion of calling this an “app.”

    • stopit@lemmy.ml
      3·
      3 years ago

      I discovered Lemmy on my laptop…but there is a F-droid app for it. That I am using right now

      • Jesse@lemmy.ml
        1·
        3 years ago

        I find the mobile version through a mobile browser is pretty amazing. Far better than any app I’ve used to access this instance.

  • BlackLotus@lemmy.ml
    18·
    3 years ago

    Everything is political. The notion that you can do things and have them not have political consequences and be politically informed is a total falsehood and illusion.

    This app is just honest and upfront about its politics, in contrast to something like Reddit which is “apolitical” which just means the admins explicitly support the status quo.

  • eyeballkid@lemmy.ml
    171·
    3 years ago

    Founder effect, to a limited extent. The people who developed Lemmy started lemmy.ml, a server (aka instance) specifically for “leftist privacy and FOSS enthusiasts”. This was the description that they chose for the server and a significant portion of the people who joined the server did so because of that description. Leftist is a political term.

    By design, Lemmy can be pointed at different servers for different content. You can pull up https://join-lemmy.org/instances for some ‘approved’ servers. A given server could be right-leaning, centrist, or totally apolitical. It may be that you chose to join lemmy.ml because it seems to be the most active lemmy instance. It currently is, but it also happens to have a lot of users who are interested in politics.

    Ultimately the answer to your question is “Because you linked up your app with a lemmy server that chooses to focus on politics.”

    • gpio@feddit.de
      21·
      3 years ago

      I don’t think the majority joined this server for its leftism. People joined because it’s called “lemmy.ml” and seems to be official/ “the right one”. I believe many people actually get scared away from lemmy when their feed suddenly gets filled with communism. Who had the glorious idea to build a decentralized network but at the same time give its own server the name of the network ??

      • hazelnot@lemmy.ml
        2·
        3 years ago

        I 100% joined this instance because it’s left-wing (and seemed less tankie than the other left-wing instances)

      • eyeballkid@lemmy.ml
        2·
        3 years ago

        I don’t have any solid data to back up my ‘significant portion’ comment above, other than the fact that I see a lot of active users on lemmy.ml who seem content with the leftist vibe on the server. Not a very good basis for making such a broad statement. Whoops!

        It’d be interesting to dig deeper into the issue through polling or something similar, but this type of self-sorting is probably hard to capture. People who read the description and choose not to join aren’t around to vote in a poll and neither are people who get scared away by what they see. For other ‘apps’, it’d be possible to catch some data from the second category of people by exit-polling people who choose to delete their accounts.

        Your question was probably rhetorical, but I went ahead and did a search since I didn’t know the background. From the AMA that I found it looks like two people developed Lemmy from scratch and their only financing was obtained through donations. I don’t blame them if they wanted to call dibs on the most obvious server name and make ground rules for it that appealed to them.

      • AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml
        1·
        3 years ago

        The whole point of the fediverse is that there is no “right” or “default” server.

        If you think “Lemmy.ml” is misleading people into thinking that the server is official, what about “Lemmy.ca”? Or “Lemmy.pt”? There are plenty of instances that follow the same format. Same with mastodon.social, run by the devs, and the countless other mastodon.* domains.

  • SFloss (they/them)@lemmy.ml
    10·
    3 years ago

    The English writer Wells went to the Soviet Union a few years ago and visited Maxim Gorky, a great writer who is gone today. He proposed the creation of a literary club from which politics would be excluded, for, to his mind, literature is literature and politics is politics. Gorky and his friends, it seems, began to laugh and Wells was annoyed. The fact is Wells saw the writer as being outside of society, while Gorky and his friends knew full well that it just is not so in life, where, in truth, all things are linked together—whether we like it or not.

    • eyeballkid@lemmy.ml
      0·
      3 years ago

      I can see where reasonable people could have a difference of opinion about whether literature can be apolitical. At least Wells wasn’t walking into an existing political club in order to object to all of the political talk.

    • gpio@feddit.de
      08·
      3 years ago

      This doesn’t explain anything. What an unnecessary anecdote. Everyone can abstain from being too political, including the Lemmy admins

        • gpio@feddit.de
          1·
          3 years ago

          The PeerTube network. The organization behind it, Framasoft, doesn’t push radical views on its users. And, more importantly, the instance of the developers (framatube.org) is nowhere near being the center of the network, while lemmy.ml is the focal point of lemmy. The admins of lemmy have the responsibility to not be too political as the whole network relies on this server.

          • AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml
            1·
            3 years ago

            Peertube has a massive neo Nazi problem because all the far rights that got banned from YouTube moved there. People have been complaining about that for ages.

  • stopit@lemmy.ml
    81·
    3 years ago

    This reminds me of my favorite quote from Sally Bowles in the play “Caboret” just before Hitler took over Berlin…“it’s just politics, it doesn’t matter”

    It did and it does.

  • Ninmi
    51·
    3 years ago

    The developers actually do a pretty good job of keeping politics out of the app itself and in the lemmy.ml instance instead, so the title of this post is quite misleading.

    One thing people need to understand that lemmy.ml is not inteded to be a generalist flagship instance (like mastodon.social is to Mastodon), even if it’s maintained by the lead developers of the project.

  • Thann@lemmy.ml
    3·
    3 years ago

    The software isn’t political, instances can be though

    I guess the license is a bit polical though