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 [email protected] or this community would fit better for this kind of question, but I assume it fits here.)
I view the focus on Lemmy’s political opinions as a weakness for attracting new users.
For me, it’s neither strength nor weakness. I’m a boring old fart, I’m not here for politics.
I mostly here not for politics too… yet everywhere I look in Lemmy, it’s all politics, kinda annoying
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
I just wish the top posts on the meme pages were more than just an anti-capitalist caption and a vaguely related image.
I block most of thé memes community, the only ones remaining being [email protected] and [email protected]
Omg [email protected] is also amazing, check it out! Also there’s Risa and the Star Wars memes etc. - there are so many fantastic memes communities available:-).
Separately, you may be interested to know that the entire “vibe” of Lemmy has changed in the last two weeks. Very seriously, check out an instance where you are not logged in and just take a peek at what the most popular content is lately. I’m not suggesting that you wallow in it but you should know what’s going on lately bc it affects the future of us all.
I’m not familiar with Star Trek, so I usually don’t get those memes
the entire “vibe” of Lemmy has changed in the last two weeks.
The entire USA vibe has changed in the last two weeks, from what we can see on every social media. What happened is an important historical events, it has repercussions on all aspects of USA society
True, and btw I don’t mean that there is not good/great reasons for such even - people are DYING.
I was just pushing that thought since we were initially responding to:
I just wish the top posts on the meme pages were more than just an anti-capitalist caption and a vaguely related image.
It’s creating an environment where people who can’t handle the cultural shifts (e.g. not everyone is neurotypical) are having to heavily curate their experiences.
It’s creating an environment where people who can’t handle the cultural shifts (e.g. not everyone is neurotypical) are having to heavily curate their experiences.
Non Americans already had to curate their experience for weeks before and during the US presidential election
Not everyone wants that, but excellent point about the fact that some do:-).
And there, as now, it would be nice to constrain things.
Though you mentioned the rather powerful counterargument earlier that this was a MAJOR event, and it’s understandable that it’s leaking.
It’s definitely a weakness. There is an entire spectrum of personal beliefs, but wherever you are, if yours don’t align with the mods you get censored. Reality is every new users first week is finding out where they ‘belong’ and this both discourages new users, and creates detrimental echo chambers.
In my experience, there’s only been a handful of mods and an equally small number of instances where I feel that is likely to happen, but for the most part it seems most mods have a pretty light touch. I’ve only had one negative experience with a mod, personally, and I post quite a bit.
If your “personal beliefs” entail persecuting others for their ethnic origin, sexual orientation or gender identity, you can fuck right off. Otherwise you won’t have any trouble fitting in here.
I don’t see it as either. I don’t come to social media to engage in political discussions, so for me, the bigger issue is the lack of thriving communities around topics outside of national/world politics and technology. I’d love to see more places like startrek.online.
I think it helps to place labels onto things… and then respect those labels.
Like porn: it can get someone literally fired if they chanced upon such at work - some corpos are just looking for any excuse to cut costs, especially a repeating salary one. But so long as it is labeled, and does not appear outside of bounds… then what is the harm? (more even, studies show that places that ban porn tend to have higher rates of sexualized crime i.e. rape, so the presence of porn literally seems to help society?)
And politics: so many of us here LOVE to discuss it! But what if someone had anxiety, and could not? Could they use something like hashtags, keywords, trigger warnings I dunno, and block out most of it, for the sake of their sanity? If not, then their only recourse would be to opt-out of the Fediverse entirely, thereby taking all of the content that they would have contributed with them…
Full disclosure of my own biases: this is why I am against places such as ChapoTrapHouse from being federated with most Lemmy instances (even as I support e.g. lemm.ee’s desire to keep it) - it’s not that I want it to “not exist” (I’ve enjoyed many of my own interactions there… though it is also simultaneously true that many users from hexbear [or their alts] act as toxic bullies, ignoring people’s consent outside of those spaces, despite being told explicitly not to by their admins), so much as that I want it to be properly labeled & constrained, so that someone does not walk into it unawares, not realize what it is, and then leave the Fediverse entirely having been turned away from us due to their interactions with them.
Likewise much of the content on lemmy.ml is very much not only anti-capitalist, but anti-Western - the former I sympathize with, though the vehemence with which it is delivered and especially the latter will turn people away, as it definitely has me (especially when it abuses blatantly false tropes).
And that is the identical reason why we cannot federate with conservative spaces either, if we want to survive: it is not that we want them to not exist so much as we cannot host their content here, without making THAT action a part of our own identity. And to be clear, I don’t mean content such as “God loves us, each & every one of us” (that’s kinda an awesome thought, is it not, regardless of what we each personally believe?), but rather “I know I speak for [my specific version of a god] when I say that he (she? it? them? other?) hates some people, especially YOUR type in particular!”
But even if we took it as a given, purely for the sake of a hypothetical argument mind you, that we actually did want some type of space to not exist, what are we going to do about it - sabotage their servers? And after they spin up new ones, with better protections - then what? No, the real recourse (imho) is to simply leave them be, yet not choose to federate their content here. We all were young & naive once too - they may grow given time, or not, but that’s their business, and all we can and should (and actually MUST) control is ours.
In all of the above cases - including the pornography example - it is not what the content is (or sometimes not just that), so much as the unfriendliness of it appearing outside of bounds, causing legitimate pain and harm when it is exposed to people.
I think the way to maximize utility is to increase diversity by increasing welcomingness. Sorta like how Linux does not push people into any one distro, or window manager, or anything at all - we each are free to pursue our own paths. That’s fucking awesome!:-P
Lest anything think that I’ve refused to answer the question: it is both. Our (future) political diversity can both be a wedge driven between us - if we allow that to happen naturally - or else a source of strength, e.g. to allow a centrist person to post content unrelated to their political beliefs (woodworking? a game community?), so long as they are respectful of other people’s beliefs in the process. We don’t all have to like one another, just get along. In diversity we find strength… or we could, if we did it right, i.e. if only the ones offered in good faith were allowed to stay while all others given the boot, and even then they need to remain within their allotted lanes.
Preemptively to the people who will scroll to the bottom of this, see me saying that diversity is a strength, and comment or just downvote and move on without bothering to read the rest: fuck you. But to anyone willing to offer a good-faith critique: I am listening.
I said this on reddit a long time ago and I’ll say it here:
We need a political tag like the NSFW tagThat would be so great
Echo chambers are never good, no matter the politics. Just reading this comment thread is proof. Some of these comments are fucking ridiculous.
Half of Lemmy working to ensure that we never get any diversity of opinions or anymore normal people lol
Weird seeing you again, and seeing you say this, after you quickly resorted to name-calling over a disagreement in another thread just 20 minutes ago. Do you really not think that you’re a member of the half you refer to? I’m not so sure you actually want “diversity of opinions” or “normal people” if that’s been your response so far.
You took a bad position, I clarified why it was unfounded.
That’s called a discussion. You are entitled to post your opinion, I am entitled to provide a rebuttal.
That’s how discourse works.
Oh no, the poor right whingers aren’t being represented here.
Oh wait, good. Fuck ‘em.
They still have to suffer from shiti health insurance…
But sure let’s make sure nobody but a good neo libs “allies” are permitted here champ
In your country sure.
And who the fuck wants neo libs here? Neo libs (and libs) are right wing ideologies.
Totally. Maybe we should invent some kind of… oh I dunno, ideological purity test? Surely that would not eat our faces off, hrm? Surely we can exclude only “them”, while keeping “us”.
Smh, it’s always the same. People don’t even see it.
Maybe lemmy will grow over time to include more types of people.
Social unrest may evolve this network faster than expected, in particular ways that are not foreseen. So, in my mind there are two paths for lemmy. A stable growth or chaotic .
Edit : unrest in any country that has a lot of lemmy users if alternative social networks clamp down or are unsafe to use
reddit appears to have started to clean up discussions re current event. Looks like government and media push started yesterday, socials are following today. The Regime is clearly not happy.
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.
Not everywhere though - e.g. lemm.ee tries to keep things open, at least on the instance level, and the anarchist servers (chiefly lemmy.dbzer0.com but iirc slrpnk.net as well) very much do not remove things that many people would expect them to if they had been more driven by a more authoritarian mindset.
In our new community [email protected] for instance, I very much hope that we can remove comments that attempt such a shouting-down as would make people feel unwelcomed to be there - regardless of their political affiliation (so long as the people being shouted down do not DESERVE it for trolling, e.g. “my reason for helping the less fortunate than myself is my belief in the Christian God who guides all my ways” is absolutely fine but “your gawd is shit and u r too, l0s3r” is not).
I think its one of the reasons reddit will never reach the mainstream like reddit. For one people find it confusing to find a community which I disagree with, you just need to take a slight effort to understand that you have a choice of community and in return you get great freedom. Since its mostly for more techies I and its overwhelmingly like left, people with moderate right views will feel like they’re completely out of place.
Im also sad that many of the bigger communities like ml have unhinged mods that ban for anyone disagreeing with them. For example some calls for violence being overwhelmingly onesided on here made me feel sick at times. But I don’t feel like sparking that debate over here.
Im also sad that many of the bigger communities like ml have unhinged mods that ban for anyone disagreeing with them. For example some calls for violence being overwhelmingly onesided on here made me feel sick at times. But I don’t feel like sparking that debate over here.
For people interested on that topic, [email protected] is a dedicated community
Pro-Tip: do NOT tell people irl that you use Lemmy. 100% of the times I’ve done this, I get the most horrible looks from them. It took me a long time to figure out why, but the short explanation is that the Alt-Left is here, so it’s equivalent to saying that you use Truth Social, just on the other side.
I’ve told people I use Lemmy several times, I only got neutral or positive reactions.
Lemmy is quite obscure, so most of the people have no idea what it is.
The top Google hit to an instance isn’t “here” but rather Lemmy.ml (DuckDuckGo chooses Lemmy.World, but as long as we are talking normies here…). Lemmy.ml’s default method of showing posts is Local, rather than All. Combined, this means that a mainstream normal person will see first primarily the Alt-Left propaganda machine pushing for the violent overthrow of capitalism and Western society, and then will NOT see so much of all the cute cartoons and Star Trek memes and such. Especially prior to the USA election, there was very much an obvious bias promoting the idea that BoTh SiDeS sAmE.
Your approach used on Reddit of pointing to a highly specific instance recommendation, especially one that has defederated from Lemmy.ml, is carefully crafted to avoid the scenario I outlined above from happening. And irl it’s helpful to do the same: don’t say that you use “Lemmy”, bc that has a very pronounced reputation.
don’t say that you use “Lemmy”, bc that has a very pronounced reputation.
People really don’t know about it. Maybe it’s my environment, but at this point I would almost be happy if people could talk to me negatively about Lemmy rather than just no know what it is
Not me, I’m salty about it:-) 😔 😭
It is a weakness.
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.
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People that shy away from this stuff are almost always rich people that are intentionally unsympathetic to the plight of poor people.
[citation needed]
If you lose your shit when you hear about politics, you simply don’t care about helping others. Period.
Now listen here whippersnapper I’ve been around too long to not know that it is, in fact, helpful for your praxis to touch grass. Declare it political if you want, but don’t bloody talk about politics while doing it.
Read Clausewitz: Absolute war is impossible because for a people to turn all its efforts to war, it would have to give up the things that it is fighting to defend. War being nothing but the continuation of politics by other means, this also applies to politics.
It is you, here, who is trying to make politics an absolute war, you’re the one barging into a bar where people are singing the people’s songs and dancing the people’s dances and say “up, to arms! what are you dancing, what are you singing, you need to fight for your right to sing and dance!”.
In short: Your praxis boils down to party pooping. Don’t be a party pooper. Party with the people, then go back to your politics as others go back to their looms and mills.
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Tsk, tsk. Upvoting yourself from alt accounts is generally a bannable offense. I’ve reported you.
Note: You’re not being silenced for your opinion, here. You’re being silenced, if you do get silenced, for your abuse of Lemmy systems. I realize you’re probably going to conflate the two dishonestly, but that’s what happened.
Tsk, tsk. Upvoting yourself from alt accounts is generally a bannable offense. I’ve reported you.
Do you have any evidence?
https://kbin.earth/m/[email protected]/t/740517/Do-you-think-the-mostly-limited-range-of-political-views/comment/4095945/favourites
Note the upvote from his alt on programming.dev, along with two suspect upvotes from other @infosec.pub accounts at exactly the same time. The one from @lemmy.eco.br seems like it could be real.
So… you’re banned here? Why then do I see your posts?
Cut that victim complex and actually engage with what I said instead of complaining that noone’s listening when you say shit 99.99% of people here already know, providing not solutions but analysis that is so undercomplex it barely qualifies as soundbites.
You’re not being a revolutionary, here. You’re an angry kid taking their first breath, loudly screaming as to the sudden incursion of the real-world into your sheltered life. Plenty others have been taking breaths for long enough to not be screaming, but scheming. Get to that level instead of having the gall to say “when people ignore me then that must be because they’re billionaires”. Too easy. Suspiciously easy, don’t you think? How many people ignore you, downvote you, how many billionaires are actually on lemmy?
“Allergic to analogies” should be your username. I’m not reading that insipid wall of text when the first sentence misunderstands my very clear analogy. Of course no one mentioned banning me. Try to follow along.
You may want to have a look at the definition of “sarcasm” and “rhetoric”.
I explained, in detail, why you’re getting ignored. You still refuse to engage with the topic. Try to not ignore me, ignore others, maybe then you’ll understand why what you say you simply doesn’t resonate. It takes more than one person to vibe.
Did that non sequitur rebuttal make sense to you in your head? 🤡
People that shy away from this stuff are almost always rich people that are intentionally unsympathetic to the plight of poor people.
[citation needed]
Lol, say you are a westerner liberal without saying you are a westerner liberal
Congratulations, you found a very novel thought-terminating cliche. I’m impressed by your creativity.
you know absolutely nothing about us in global south.
Brazilian, eh? You mean the country with higher GDP/capita than no less than nine European countries?
Stop pretending to know, in any shape or form, what it is like to be born in Burundi. And don’t pretend you’re not a colonial state, you’re barely better than the US when it comes to fucking over the indigenous population and that’s not a high standard.
Stop pretending that 7:1 is an everyday occurrence and count those stars on your jersey.
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…
That’s true. However, I think there was a massive propaganda effort, quite successful, to get people to follow certain antipatterns of logic to help get Trump elected:
- “I care deeply about the genocide in Gaza, so I won’t vote for Democrats, even though Trump will make the genocide much worse and also create new ones.”
- “I care deeply about inflation and working people, so I’ll vote for Trump, even though Trump will make inflation much worse.”
- “I care deeply about crime and illegal immigration, so I’ll vote for Trump, even though his insane policies will mostly punish the innocent and create much more of the underlying conditions that lead to violent crime.”
And so on. It happens that foolish people on the left who thought that refusing to vote for Democrats was a way to help the Palestinians were one of the target audiences. But in the aggregate, I think the combination of those diverse populations getting suckered in their individual ways absolutely had a big impact on the election.
And please don’t say I am blaming the people that oppose the genocide in Gaza. I oppose the genocide in Gaza. Everyone on Lemmy opposes the genocide in Gaza. Because I oppose the genocide in Gaza, I didn’t want Trump to get elected, because he is about to make things much, much worse. If you have some tactical disagreement with how I want to oppose genocide, because you also oppose it but in some different way, then fine. But pretending that I have an issue with people who oppose genocide is just a dishonest strawman engineered in some think-tank somewhere, to help get Trump elected.
Yeah, there was certainly a lot of propaganda and lies to help elect Donald, but let’s be very real here - leftists not voting or voting third party over Gaza wasn’t a major part of his victory. Kamala Harris had a very weak campaign that didn’t address the concerns of young, white male voters. Personalities like Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, and others really do appeal to those people, telling them that they’re just fine and pointing their fingers at an endless list of targets to keep these people angry and afraid - and ultimately to vote for people like Donald who claim they’ll fix everything. I wasn’t trying to strawman but I have seen a lot of online comments purely blaming leftists for this election, and it’s frustrating.
What did I say, in my comment, to address exactly what you just repeated?
Specifically I’m interested in this part:
Yeah, there was certainly a lot of propaganda and lies to help elect Donald, but let’s be very real here - leftists not voting or voting third party over Gaza wasn’t a major part of his victory.
That had a very specific answer in the comment you’re replying to.
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.
Kamala in no way, shape, or form supported any kind of peace in Palestine. So I have no idea what you’re pretending about.
Then please stop by [email protected]
Subbed
Not sure if you’re there, but there’s [email protected] too
Yep, I subbed to that one when it moved from .world
There needs to be a lemmy.norm or some shit.
Just photoshop requests, memes, hobbies and dumb “askreddit” shit.
Discuss.Online seems that way.
Perhaps lemmy.today although that barely has any local content.
lemmy.ca? It does have a [email protected] but other stuff too:-).
I find it highly interesting how in the replies to your message people are proving you right:-).
But fwiw, I do want to push back a little on my own irt your phrasing: perhaps it is not so much the intensity of someone’s views as the degree of welcomingness extended to people of all walks. Non-intuitively to some: this REQUIRES that we kick out people engaging in bad faith. However, once that’s done, shouldn’t we extend a welcoming hand to all who come in good faith?
Tbh I may not be expressing myself well there… so I’ll try with more extreme language: Nazis are bad, and thereby the Alt-Right that extends a welcoming hand to neo-nazis are bad, but centrists and liberals (both of whom would be called right-wing by many people internationally) should be made to feel welcomed? So breadth of political views - so long as delivered in good faith - not that the breadth is the thing desired, but rather the allowance for PEOPLE to come in and talk, if they want, regardless of their political views. The focus here is on the people - the tolerance is just the means to that good end (and this only works if we are intolerant to specifically those who are themselves intolerant).
I find it highly interesting how in the replies to your message people are proving you right:-).
Lol, what replies? I guess I’ve already blocked most/all the people I was referring to (or they’re on
.mlwhich I don’t federate with for pretty much this exact reason)[The rest of it]
When, out of nowhere, people put other people into boxes, ascribe a political label to them, and put words in their mouths without knowing anything about them, it is a HUGE turn off to me as far as interactions go.
e.g. A comment that’s taken out of context and the reply is basically, “Hurr, durr, that’s such an enlightened centrist thing to say. Guess you’re okay with a little fascism, huh, lib?”. That’s pretty fucking cringe and going to make me immediately block the person saying it (and I have and will continue to do so). Like, if that’s how their mind works, taking things out of context, jumping to conclusions, and projecting labels out of nowhere: I got nothing for them.
I’m not here with an agenda, I’m not trying to spread my beliefs, I’m not trying to convert anyone to anything (except maybe Linux lol), etc. I just wanna share and talk about cool shit.
And you know there’s someone reading this thinking (and possibly commenting) that the fact I haven’t announced myself to the room as a raging leftie means I must be a nazi in disguise. (Nope. Just someone who’s not here for political shit). My political beliefs and leanings are my own, and if they’re not apparent from my post/comment history, then whoever’s judging me just hasn’t paid attention.
As for how I treat people, as long as they’re clearly operating in good faith and with a good attitude, I welcome them until such time they’ve veered outside of civility or proven to be a troll, actual Nazi, or otherwise.
Exactly. Judgement is such hard work - best to avoid it when possible, but if necessary, not shy away from it either. Although in the latter case some WORK needs to be put in, if the desire is to do it correctly.
So many people claiming “bUt i WaS BaNNeD foR beInG ToO FrIenDlY, i’M ReaLlY sUcH a nIcE gUy”, when it is patently obvious to anyone who looks that that is not the case.
On Lemmy.world it’s a weakness. Your instance may vary
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)
Yeah hasn’t been helpful for getting a sense for the minds of the masses but generally a lot more grounded than reddit
Also though echo chambers are bad most of the time for most people, occasionally they help in challenging our own beliefs but only when engaged critically.
