Sure, there are always outliers and you can correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s just the overall impression I have.
(I wasn’t sure if !asklemmy@lemmy.world or this community would fit better for this kind of question, but I assume it fits here.)
I find the limited political knowledge a far bigger concern. The US has taken perfectly acceptable words and butchered them: liberal, libertarian, conservative, left, fascist, socialist etc mean different things inside the US to what they mean everywhere else. I reckon US political language hasn’t butchered itself - there’s a plan in there somewhere.
I think it’s a strength because I don’t want to chat with fascists, thanks
I think it’s both. I can avoid having to engage with cruel or shitty perspectives as often, but I also don’t love spending so much social time in an echo chamber, it’s not great for you.
I think echo chambers are really bad for a culture and for people immersed in them, but like not seeing Nazi shit is certainly nice
Mixed opinion these days often reads more like outright polarization vs balanced discussions.
I don’t care so much about the range of political views, just the quantity of them.
Too many people on Lemmy make their political ideology their entire identity, and it’s just freaking exhausting.
Can we not just be people talking to other people about cool stuff? I just get sick of political ideologies masquerading as people.
There needs to be a lemmy.norm or some shit.
Just photoshop requests, memes, hobbies and dumb “askreddit” shit.
Then please stop by !dull_mens_club@lemmy.world
Subbed
Not sure if you’re there, but there’s !casualconversation@lemm.ee too
Yep, I subbed to that one when it moved from .world
People that shy away from this stuff are almost always rich people that are intentionally unsympathetic to the plight of poor people. They’re the same people who downplay and mock trans people and other minorities because they have never known even a moment of misfortune or injustice in their entire lives.
If you lose your shit when you hear about politics, you simply don’t care about helping others. Period.
Personally, I don’t give a flying fuck about making Lemmy a safe space for the apolitical. Simply existing in the WORLD is political.
Until supposedly civilized countries stop grinding the poor into hamburger to feed their rich, the poor should be able to make their plight known and no space should be safe from that. In fact, I will actively avoid, boycott, and mock any social media platform that censors the poor from expressing their REAL opinions while pretending to care about free speech.
It is interesting to me that the people who are PASSIONATELY concerned about the plight of poor people in the third world, spend so much time pushing the solution of not voting for Kamala Harris, and so little time pushing support for charity work, NGOs in the United States, supporting the rare tiny handful of politicians who actually do care about human rights, or similar things. I think the amount of content I saw from them before the election that was dealing exclusively with the importance of not supporting Democrats probably outnumbered the other stuff by about 10:1. I guess as long as we make enough Kamala Harris memes, the Palestinians will be saved. Who knew?
Well, it worked out in the last election, I can’t wait for everything to get better for everyone in Gaza. That’s definitely what’s going to happen now, right?
Did you even look at the votes in the election? Not enough people voted third party to make a difference in the results of the election. But sure, try to blame people that oppose the genocide in gaza. Sure…
I’ve run into you a few times. Let me save us both some time with the bullshit lesser of two evils finger wagging, neolib.
I’m here because I DON’T want to have to read fucked up opinions. People here are mostly nice compared to mainstream platforms.
I’m all for difference of opinion, but not when one of those opinions is “we should oppress LGBT people” for example. 10-15 years ago, I’d have been more receptive to discussing opposing opinions, but shit has changed. A lot of those opposing opinions are now simply unacceptable to even entertain, because they’ve become a real, actual threat to my well-being. People aren’t discussing tax policy anymore, they are discussing imposing states of emergency to do some kind of purge on undesirables.
Some people call it an echo chamber, I just call it chilling and having fun with like-minded people. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s what forums have always been.
Yeah, I don’t think anyone would ask you “Are you okay with sitting at the bar with nazis?” yet plenty will happily judge you for saying “I’d rather not have to deal with MAGAts and their opinions”
Sorry but if your opinion is “trans people aren’t people” or “blacks need to know their place” then your opinion is shit and no the fuck I don’t have to listen to it
People here are mostly nice compared to mainstream platforms.
Try disagreeing with the hive mind. Anyone can be nice to someone who echo’s their own opinion. The real niceness of a person is revealed when they can show civility to people they disagree with (I’m not talking about LGBTQ oppressors or Nazis…there’s a huge spectrum of opinions that aren’t extreme).
I’m on BlueSky on top of IceShrimp because anything better than Twitter is good to use at this point.
Let’s see how downvoted I get.
I’m also on BlueSky as well as Mastodon, because BlueSky has the momentum right now, and critical mass is important.
In that same vein, I wish you’d treat LW as you do any other instance. We’re not hostile to other instances, and I think there’s a healthy balance right now. It doesn’t hurt Lemmy to have a bigger, more mainstream instance. I think defederation solely for the sake of defederation does hurt Lemmy.
I wish you’d treat LW as you do any other instance. We’re not hostile to other instances, and I think there’s a healthy balance right now. It doesn’t hurt Lemmy to have a bigger, more mainstream instance. I think defederation solely for the sake of defederation does hurt Lemmy.
I never advocated for defederation of LW, just for more decentralization rather than have 90% of the active communities on LW.
You never answered my latest comment: https://lemmy.world/comment/13624614
Just to make it sure, are you saying that it’s not true that at this moment
- !showsandmovies@lemm.ee has 1.85k monthly active users
- !television@lemmy.world has 754 monthly active users?
What prevents you from locking !television@lemmy.world, redirect to !showsandmovies@lemm.ee, and get that community more active?
I can even make you or any other LW mod mod of that community too, I’m not attached to being a mod, I just want communities to flourish on other instances as well.
Because besides monthly active users, LW has 4,600 subscribers where lemm.ee has 537. It’s not a clear cut case.
What good is 4600 subscribers when 754 are active?
I just checked the updated numbers, now it’s 2.57k monthly active users for lemm.ee vs 958 on LW.
On !showsandmovies@lemm.ee, we actively build the community, we have a best of 2024 post, we opened the moderation posts to any person willing to help, while you keep that community unmoderated with 2 bots as mods.
Really, I just don’t understand. What are you afraid of? I’m pretty sure that !mapporn@lemmy.world had more subs than !map_enthusiasts@sopuli.xyz when it was locked down, but it was still okay, because the activity was happening on the sopuli instance.
I just checked, !electricvehicles@lemmy.world has more subscribers than !electricvehicles@slrpnk.net , but the slrpnk community was still chosen when the consolidation happened: https://lemm.ee/post/46935805
If you’re afraid about losing the people, you just pin a post, point to the new community, similar to !casualconversation@lemmy.world, and that’s it.
I did everything fair. “Not happy with the community? Create your own, and become the better one!”. I did, everything, and while we’ve had success, the LW staying open hinders the growth of that topic as a whole.
You ask me to treat LW as any other instance, but no other instance is reacting in that way, preferring to keep some of their communities open when other people actively try to build an active community on a topic that apparently only a few people are interested in anyway.
I don’t know. I am still as opinionated and difficult as I ever was on Reddit, but I also turn it around, display civility, and cede points far more often here. Maybe I’m becoming better, but I think it’s just a better situation overall.
I’ve received way more bitter and raged out responses here than I’ve ever received on Reddit for very lukewarm vanilla takes. I’m not saying Lemmy is full of extremists but there is a user base here that is all or nothing. My guess is it’s age related though.
The version of someone you invite in the door determines the initial trajectory of how that person will act in the community. You can invite in the leading edge of someone’s developing kindness or invite in the ossifying mass of their nature that is threatening to turn hateful and uncaring. No one instance of invitation to a new person (however that may happen, formally or informally) pushes the needle far either way within any one particular person (though sometimes it can radically do so) but the overall integrated effect is a moderate shift of the an entire community towards the better or worse version of the community members. When this effect is used for good people often describe the resulting community space as a community that accepts them for who they are or more succintly is a genuinely safe space.
Of course, every interaction is in an invitation in some small way, it doesn’t just happen once.
Normally I’d say it was a weakness but the right has significantly departed from reality in most countries for way too long now. It’s incredibly rare to find a right-winger who can be present in a discussion without spewing a whole lot of vile conspiracy hate fascist bullshit.
So I find their absence refreshing, desirable and a strength of Lemmy.
I find the same on the left wing. Everytime I put out a slightly right wing position I get attacked and a ton of down votes.
Every time anyone mentions on Lemmy right wing positions it is with only to attack a strawman version that is very removed from what most right wing people think/do.
I empathize, as a human being you have to realize that it is YOU that has to use politics as a tool & NOT BECOME a tool of Politics (Do you get what I mean) Use both Right & Left policies, I think it was called Moderatism or Communitarianism
You’re comparing downvotes with “vile conspiracy hate fascist bullshit”. The behavior I’m talking about isn’t hurtful in the social-rejection way that downvotes are, it goes way way beyond that. Can you see the difference?
Downvotes can’t actually hurt you.
Personally, I’m fine with saying unpopular things and getting downvoted for it. Mods removing a disallowed viewpoint is something different.
They don’t hurt, but they still do not feel nice.
Just remember that the first person to say the world went around the sun got downvoted into oblivion… but it is factually accurate and a giant leap towards out current understanding of the physical realm. I’m happy for people to disagree with my views. Fuck, I probably disagreed with half of them, thirty years ago.
Please… this is a serious display of availability bias.
Let’s face it: the demographic here is just a hyper concentrated version of Reddit, which itself is mostly middle-upper class tweenagers from affluent countries. They get online and get convinced that everyone is just like them.
The average person that hangs out on Reddit-like forums absolutely does not represent the population at large, and any “right-winger who can be present in a discussion without spewing a whole lot of vile conspiracy hate fascist bullshit” has learned that there is no way one can have a reasonable exchange of ideas in any forum like this.
Your points about social bubbles and echo chambers are true, but experiencing the displeasure of having to routinely interact with rightwingers in person verifies that they have fully-fledged conviction in their “vile conspiracy hate fascist bullshit”. They can’t have a reasonable exchange of ideas because they bring nothing reasonable or empathetic to the table.
There are many right wingers here, not conservatives. Liberals are right wing, and lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works are mainly liberal instances.
What rimu was mainly talking about are conservatives, or even far right users. So he wasn’t criticizing the whole right wing, he just used the term right wing to refer to those.
I know it’s comfortable to sit and call anything slightly right of ultra socialism as ‘right wing’ but a spectrum exists.
To conflate republican evangelical dominionist Christians with liberals is peak hubris.
There is a saying: ‘when you’re a hammer, every problem is a nail’. When you reduce everything to class warfare you’re not engaging in an effective discourse to reduce harm in the world. You’re just pontificating on the merits of socialism, which yea, we all agree are neat. But so what? You think folding everyone else into a basket gives you credence or helps the discourse in any way?
Liberals are right wing
Case closed.
They are? i’m not sure where you live, but most of the world considers them to be right wing.
No. Liberalism is against most things that the right wing of the political spectrum explicitly stands for. Liberalism exists as a counter argument to conservatism. As I mentioned earlier US political language has twisted and distorted what these words really mean.
Liberalism is against most things that the right wing of the political spectrum explicitly stands for
I’m assuming you’re talking in a US perspective.
Leftism describes a spectrum of political ideologies that seeks to minimize hierarchies and desires to achieve equality and egalitarianism. Liberalism is a pro-capitalist ideology, and capitalism is hierarchial and is unequal. Thus, liberalism is right wing. Progressivism isn’t related to right or left wing. You can be a communist but socially conservative. You can be fiscally conservative and be progressive. In the US, being left wing or right wing is mainly measured on how progressive, or if you support social programs (a little leftist, but still can be right wing, just center-right). Liberalism is right wing. Conservatism is far right.
but most of the world considers them to be right wing.
Yep. I’m fiscally conservative, mildly sympathetic to people who fear and resist change, and fond of the pragmatic pursuit of libertarian ideals, where that’s possible.
I also feel that how others do sex is none of my damn business, taxes supporting social services are necessary, and equitably applied rule of law is critical for any real economic prosperity.
On the scale of history, I suspect that makes me centrist or even a moderate conservative.
In my country, and today, somehow, astonishingly, this combination makes me what most would call very left leaning.
I feel that the right has gone insane and continues to alienate people who might otherwise have been allies.
In my country, and today, somehow, astonishingly, this combination makes me what most would call very left leaning.
Let me guess, the US? The only people i’ve ever heard call liberals something as BS as far-left communists are conservative americans. The overton window in america is so ridiculous it’s hilarious.
For attracting new users, the extreme views of the majority of users on this platform are detrimental. I personally very much dislike how one-sided all platforms are now. They lean heavily to one side or the other, which isn’t an accurate representation of the world. Most people are somewhere in the middle, yet online they’re expected to behave according to the platform’s presiding mindset or be shouted down.
Mostly mixed. The way i think it’s a weakness is because I’m an anti authoritarian leftist, and i’d like a stronger anarchist/libertarian community on lemmy. Despite hexbear/lemmygrad/lemmy thriving, Solarpunk and dbzer0 feel a little lacking community wise. I’d also like a diverse political community, in general.
Another con is that if you even just disagree with a [bastard] moderator, they’ll immediately ban you. Happens on lemmy.world with being anti-zionist, happens on lemmy.ml under the guise of ‘rule 1’ for literally just criticizing a mod such as dessalines.
But i also think it’s a pro due to the lack of far-right content on lemmy. I remember on reddit casually seeing disgusting content, such as blatant racism (Such as arabs being called sand n-rs, Or racism against asians/immigrants in general on r/canada + r/europe) and most of that is obscure on lemmy.
I’m not denying that the Lemmy community doesn’t have problems, Lord no. But it’s much better than most other platforms.
Haha ML loves to ban you for even the slightest challenge of their views.
Don’t even need to challenge it. Just criticize a mod, and you’re banished to the void lmao
Talking about Yogthos eh?
Don’t forget our dear Dessalines, he’s a very sensitive one.
Because everyone knows, the best response when your lack of sources is met with sources is just “🤡”
i’d like a stronger anarchist/libertarian community on lemmy.
That’s one thing that I’ve been both disappointed and surprised to not see.
The anarchist community on Reddit is fairly large, but not very anarchist. There’s a very strong authoritarian bent to their claimed anarchism. I had hopes that the nature of this place would invite a community that was anarchist not only in name but in spirit, but I’ve seen surprisingly little sign of that, or even really of anarchism at all.
db0 is real anarchists, as far as I can tell. Because they are not overbearing about it, it’s harder to be aware of them.
I think by definition, it’s easier to be aware of the “official” self-identified anarchist communities than the ones that are just doing their own thing.
I assumed that they were at least anarchism-adjacent - it’s pretty much a prerequisite for the bulk of their focus.
I hadn’t really looked into their political posting much though, and yeah - even with just a cursory glance, it’s promising.
And I hadn’t thought about that distinction between people who simply hold a position and people who “officially” wear the label in the context of anarchism (though I’ve noted it often with atheists), but yeah, there’s undoubtedly some truth there.
Thanks for the heads-up.
The slrpnk admins, as far as I can tell, stand in the same relationship to anarchism that your average megachurch organization does with Christianity.
If all you look at is the words, it looks like they’re supporting it.
Absolutely yes. Anarchists on reddit were largely only anarchist by name, and we don’t even have a proper community here. And anarchist communities on instances such as lemmy.ml are even worse, to be honest. Most political representation on lemmy is for authoritarian leftists, where’s the love for anarchy :(
It’s a weakness. We need more anti-authoritarians here for sure. And even conservatives if nothing else so they can represent their own opinions rather than just laughing at straw-man versions of what neolibs want to say they think. I have moments I hate it here but there’s nowhere good to go and I guess I add a little diversity.
I disagree with the conservatives part. Their ideology does not deserve a place at the adults’ table. It is far too bent on undermining democracy, equity, and egalitarian society.
EDIT: To clarify, this is elementary “Paradox of Tolerance”. Those that wish to undermine democracy in an equitable society cannot be tolerated without making an end to democracy inevitable. Not all opinions are created equal. For example: “I think trans people should receive additional state-funded support.” and “I think that trans people should be murdered and/or the state should cultivate an environment amplifying their likelihood to commit suicide.” (the prevailing view expressed by the far-right through their actions and legislation) are opinions that should not be given equal treatment.
Yep, paradox of tolerance. We shouldn’t bend over for far-right, or even fascists for the sake of “pure tolerance”.
Saying, “I don’t like what they say so they shouldn’t have a voice” sounds a lot like undermining democracy to me. Them living in conservative echo chambers doesn’t increase dialog or challenge their beliefs either. Divided media and divided opinions are the tools to take down a nation. Supporting this kind of division strikes me as an example of the main kind of foreign interference this country is crumbling because of. If that was your goal, I guess congratulations?
Paradox of Tolerance. Those that intend to undermine a just and equitable society that tolerates the existence of all kinds of people cannot be tolerated.
But do we actually wait until we see how people think, or just silence them based on their opinion on one or twy divisive issues as a litmus test to justify our own intolerance? “They don’t support trans women in women sports so none of their opinions are valid.”
It’s, unfortunately, very subjective. A statement like that could be from a place of ignorance that they are willing to dig into and grow as a person. Any judgement has to include whether good faith is intended, etc. Conservativism itself is incompatible with motion towards a more just world, as rigid hierarchy is part of its core, and it is also an ideology rife with bad faith actors. Giving extra space for such an ideology that already has a far louder voice than it should have does not result in anything productive.
The type of anarchism that says, “You must agree with my anarchism, and if you have some incorrect view, I’ll use my powers to remove you from the space” is not actually anarchism. It’s actually strikingly reminiscent of how the Russian implementation of communism had nothing to do with worker-led socialism that it was branded as. They implemented freedom by declaring themselves the arbiters of what were the allowed types of freedom and ruthlessly repressing anything else, which isn’t how it works.
In general, I think it’s a myth that if you disagree with liberal orthodoxy on lemmy.world, you’ll be banned. Plenty of people on lemmy.world constantly criticize the liberal orthodoxy and it’s fine. The people purporting the myth are either:
- Being flaming cocks and then claiming they were banned for their factual beliefs when they get banned, when that wasn’t the issue
- Or else trying to make themselves feel better about the censorship of liberals that happens on their own instances, by claiming lemmy.world is doing the same to their “side” when they aren’t.
The occasional whining about how unfair it is that you can’t post anti-Israel stories on lemmy.world, for example, is nothing to do with reality, but is instead a disguised yearning for a space where you can’t post pro-Israel stories, and the mods will enforce that political viewpoint using their powers so the speaker can feel comfortable because all they see is things that they already agree with.
I’ve skimmed the lemmy.world modlog, and it seems you seem to be right. That was a bad example.
But my point was moreso on the stubbornness of mods. For example, if i suggest that China is bad on lemmy.ml, that’ll get me a ban under the guise of “rule 1”. Why? it’s not against the rules, it’s not bigoted or racist.
If i write controversial, or even bigoted comments, then that’s another story. I was criticizing power tripping mods that ban users if they personally disagree with them, instead of actually break the rules
Yeah, those mods are bad, and they definitely exist including unapologetically on the tankie instances. I was just saying that the mirror-image bad mod, who will delete anything anti-Israel, is almost entirely a self-serving myth by a selected group that likes to pretend.
I’m sorry but libertarians and ancaps are just proto-feudalists that may like to smoke weed.
I agree. I should have specified, i meant left-libertarianism.
It’s a weakness in the sense that there are times this place turns into a straight-up echo chamber…
But when there is actual debate going on, it tends to be a lot more civil than on other sites (most of the time)
I think it’s primarily, but not exclusively, a strength. “We need more right-wing posters” is not something I’ve ever thought of Lemmy.
Weakness.
Limited range of political views breeds echo chamber. In my experience, you can’t really have meaningful discussion inside an echo chamber. Disagreement, compromise, nuance doesn’t exists inside an echo chamber. Just that same idea repeated over and over again.
Gonna be honest, you can’t have meaningful and nuanced discussion here. Everything is black and white. Capitalism? It’s the worst thing on earth. Religious people? Those people are idiots. Don’t YOU dare use Windows, use Linux instead. ALL cops are bad, no exception.
This kind of things makes me actually scared of recommending people to Lemmy. I’m sure most people are casual people who doesn’t have extreme views on anything. Just some people who wants to shut their brain off and scroll. I feel like the echo chamber I mentioned will put most people off.
Going tangent a bit–In general fediverse is not diverse.
When you scroll, you realize most of the post comes from the same kind of political ideas, same country (USA), same beliefs, etc.
You can’t spell fediverse without spelling diverse, yet I feel like fediverse is anything but diverse.
This needs to change.
Religious people? Those people are idiots.
Okay for what it’s worth as a Muslim I’ve found Lemmings to be a lot more civil about the religion thing than redditors. At least I feel that people here are less likely to think being atheist makes them smart.
Oh hey, finally a fellow Muslim
Okay for what it’s worth as a Muslim I’ve found Lemmings to be a lot more civil about the religion thing than redditors
Unfortunately my experience here is different :(
@crimeschneck Personally I’ve decreased my Lemmy usage a lot due to its echo chambery-ness. I avoided the political subs since day one, both since I’m personally not a big politics junkie and because I’m not in alignment with Lemmy’s specific brand of politics, but things also extend to other topics as well.
A lot of the enjoyment of using Lemmy is getting news/articles and seeing what people think, but even in the tech spaces the range of tech news is somewhat limited and the top comments are almost always in line with Lemmy’s specific tech thoughts (regardless of my agreement, I’d like to see interesting thoughts/commentary, if I can predict the theme of what’s said it becomes less interesting). Sorting by new did help a little, even if a dissenting but well thought out idea was downvoted to oblivion I could still read it - but the value of link aggregators to me is articles + strangers thoughts, and if all the strangers have the same thoughts then I might as well stick with RSS.
My 2c anyways.
Honestly, especially recently I feel like this place has been just a big Opinion Bubble/Echo Chamber and as someone who values trying to avoid these types of Bubbles and wanting to see what other opinions may look like this has consistently been one of my Biggest Issues with Lemmy. Not to mention that making it really hard to honestly recommend Lemmy to outsiders
Weakness, definitely. The range of “permitted” ideas is way too narrow.
I tend to agree with most common political stances on Lemmy, but still I feel I’m self-censoring occasionally.Many instances intentionally want an echo chamber. Posts and comments are often deleted even if they’re not abusive, if they are ideologically opposed.
What ideas do you want to see more of?
The problem doesn’t seem to be that instances want to cater to a unique political group (that’s why we have federation) It’s that most instances cater to the same or similar groups. I think in general it’s better that instances are differentiated by political beliefs. For example, i don’t like Hexbear. I just block it. But if hexbear and solarpunk were a single instance, i wouldn’t be able to separate the good and the bad.
But i agree that separating yourself too much from other ideas is bad, and echo chambers are bad in general.
