A lot of questions on here are aimed at the reddit users experiences, but I’ve been wondering what the older users thought of his move. Are there any reddit cultures you are hoping do not come with the users? Are you confident or fearful of the growth coming from the reddit community? I’m curious how the reddit influx is changing these communities either for better or for worse.
The “pro-capitalist” thing isn’t bad IMHO
With Reddit users moving to Lemmy, attitudes on Lemmy become closer to reddit mean: Leaning mid-left due to the majority of users being young western people with many IT workers among them
I remember from the time when Mastodon was very young that many Mastodon instances were explitly far-left,anti-capitalist, queer, or all of this. This caused most other instances to be full.of users who don’t want that so even apolitical instances turned into far-right asshole circlejerks
Then both sides started to federate only among each other
Its not like Trumpists,Incelas and such are the majority. I’d rather deal with some shitty communities on a large instance rather than have to think about who to federate with again with half the instances blacklisted. Its not like we can prevent them from using Lemmy anyway. At least some of them might be positively influenced by exposure to other viewpoints
I’ve covered some of the points about anti-capitalism in the reply I just wrote for a similar post, so I’ll link there to avoid redundancy.
I don’t really understand the intended message with the Mastodon example. “Free speech” platforms are almost always swamped with neo-nazis, literal pedophiles and other super controversial people searching for sites to host their garbage whenever they get kicked from other places, and revolt most other people who would consider using the platform. This has nothing to do with the anti-capitalist and queer-only instances not wanting to host them, it would have happened even if those instances never existed. You might as well blame Beehaw for blocking the Trump fanatics and neo-Nazis who ended up populating Wolfballs. It doesn’t make sense, they’re not to blame. Almost any site bans those users, not just far-left, or even left, sites. Most centrists and almost any site with advertisers don’t want to share space with Gab users screeching out edgy slurs and spam either. It’s a basic expectation of being able to hold a productive conversation. Any community should be allowed to kick out anti-social invaders.
No, instances with basic standards kicking our hateful users isn’t to blame for why general instances host them. It’s the general instances that accepted them and didn’t also say no. Those general instances were allowed to kick them out too, they chose not to. Most Lemmy instances historically have kicked them, even those run by liberal capitalists.
And if they allow they platform to be turned into a Nazi pub, they’re certainly not being apolitical. Abstaining is a political decision. Trolley problem 101.
I’m fine with people not wanting to connect with instances filled with people who obsess about wanting to kill them. I don’t see the issue here.
I do understand the value of exposing people to different to viewpoints, and the dangers of echo chambers, but there is a lot of space in-between complete isolation and letting everyone into everywhere. And I actually enjoy using separate communities for each. I was one of the few users who used the former Go Talk It Out (gtio.io) Lemmy instance, where any conversation was allowed provided it was good-faith and civil. There are some conversations where I do want a range of political opinions or where political opinions don’t even matter, and others where I want to discuss a theoretical idea without unproductive spam from people who see a word and whine or troll. So I would rather see that system of federation, where instances specialise and choose who they link to appropriately.
I just assume that the far-right nutjobs are a small minority and as long as this is true, I prefer them getting drowned in one huge community over many small walled communities which only federate with a small group of similar-minded instances. Thats all. Basically the same as we had on Reddit with one large community but many different /r/ Its totally fine if you have another preference. I didn’t want to blame (leftist, general interest) instances of anything, either. Of course they have the right to kick out everyone they don’t want to give a platform (i also blocked many people on REddit over the years). IMHO Reddit worked very well as a platform with almost everyone on it, though. Till today there are many subs were a civil discussion can be had despite far-right and far-left potentially meeting. I don’t know of any for-profit commercial social media wih comparable discussion quality except specialised platforms like StackExchange or HN
When Mastodon was tiny but already stuck in the left-right battle, the banning was just getting a bit out of hand imho. Some Mastodons allowed everyone in, some hat a banlist of far-right instances, some only federated with explicitly pro-LGBTQ instances (but always incompletely, since the community is always rapidly changing). This makes it difficult for new users to choose the right server. If Lemmy/Mastodon/whatever has 100 mil users or more these things stop to matter, of course, because there is always enough content even if some highly specialised instances are missing. But before we reach that point I would rather have one large platform growing, then branching out
GTIO is an interesting concept, though, and solves the problems I assume maybe. Thanks for the link, I didn’t know about it, will check it out