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