edit: having a community dedicated to letists only can be a bad idea in that it can make sure your beliefs are not questioned. I have thought myself as a socialist and I have thought myself as a anarcho-capitalist, I don’t believe in either anymore. I think if radical views go unchecked they might cause problems. Although I am a capitalist now, being confronted by socialists has made me aware of capitalisms deep flaws. When I considered myself a communist (17 year old me) I thought opposing views really changed my mind. So that’s the ideologically diversity I am talking about.
I love the outlook of lemmy, I think the design is decent and simplistic. But one thing I can’t seem to get over is the fact that almost everyone here seem to think the same politically. Why do you guys think this is?? I know this is a community of leftists foss enthusiasts but I hope everyone here is aware that it is driving many people away from adapting it.
A community of leftist privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers
I know you already mentioned this, but… should an online car community be concerned about the lack of cyclists on their forum?
love the outlook of lemmy, I think the design is decent and simplistic. But one thing I can’t seem to get over is the fact that almost everyone here seem to think the same politically. Why do you guys think this is?? I know this is a community of leftists foss enthusiasts but I hope everyone here is aware that it is driving many people away from adapting it.
Hehe… good one. I understand that. But don’t you think it would be a better place of some people from the right joined in here
Holy shit no, Jesus Christ, I like this place because I don’t get called slurs. How could you possibly think that’s even worth saying?
FWIW, there already are people from “the right” here (at least from what I imagine your perspective is), like myself. I don’t have any reason to even contemplate slurring you. OTOH, there seem to be some tankies here, aren’t they a bit of a risk for you?
I’m a “tankie” you fucking idiot. Maybe if you stepped outside and touched some grass you would realize that Marxists were the most dedicated feminists the world over. I’m not sure how many women you’ve had a chance to see in real life though, so I can’t fault you for it.
For someone who was a “socialist” at one point you really seem to not understand much about the world or socialism. Maybe you don’t understand what you’re talking about and your terminally internet diseased brain is making you think you can just use labels with no meaning to try and seem smarter than you’ve actually put in the work to become
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There is https://wolfballs.com/ as a Lemmy instance that is more right-leaning and you are always free to host your own.
“Centrism” isn’t really a position one can have… what you mean is “in support of the status quo” which is IMHO also right leaning as it is inherently conservative.
The recent influx of Genzedong users definitely lowered the discussion quality here, but beyond those lemmygrad.ml users there is actually quite some ideological diversity in the Lemmyverse. Maybe consider signing up on an instance that does not federate with lemmygrad.ml 🤷
I think the anarchist community could be bigger but apart from that, if you block Lemmygrad you get a more or less diverse community in the left leaning spectre, I think what OP meant is they want more liberals.
There is https://wolfballs.com/ as a Lemmy instance that is more right-leaning
Eh. That’s… not a good place. An alt-right trumpster fire.
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Right, yeah. I suppose this is starting to become a known problem: free speech forums require a lot of moderation and/or culture building, or they risk becoming just another 4chan.
Libertarians like to say some version of “the cure for bad free speech is more good free speech”. Unfortunately, the internet has made bad speech essentially free of charge and consequence, and combatting it with good free speech in contrast is expensive and exhausting. This is probably one of the more difficult fundamental problems of the 2000s that needs to be fixed if we want humanity to progress.
Now Elon Musk is already talking of letting Donald Trump back on Twitter and calling his permanent ban a mistake. It’s not gonna do a lot of course, Twitter is another dumpster fire with or without Trump, it’s just gonna be a massively larger fire with him.
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It’s hard to balance it, especially with external factors. I think a particular issue is that, in my experience, most of the people seeking ‘free speech’ platforms are those who get banned from other places. And that also plays into the platform audience: I honestly believe you tolerate a very wide range of views on the platform, but the userbase and culture will lead some groups of people to like the community and others to dislike it. Contrast somewhere like gtio.io which (currently) doesn’t have a monoculture of narrow political views, with conversations about pro-communism, racism, age-of-consent and both “left” and “right” libertarianism existing in the same place, but they are not ‘free speech’ site at all: they explicitly enforce civility, for example. You won’t get racists or tankies other exclusionaries spamming mindless insults and slurs to dissuade people who don’t want to be around that, pushing the community in one direction and leading others to find more comfortable spaces. Hatred is a price of free speech, and one that keeps most less extreme people away, and leads the most popular in-group to near-monopolize. A Muslim would probably leave Lemmygrad or Wolfballs pretty quickly, but the de-facto in-groups would feel welcome, regardless of moderation and platform censorship.
I am curious as to why you say free speech would be better without anonymity: anonymity removes reputational and (significant) social filters that lead to self-censorship or harassment. Anonymous imageboards have been infamous as free speech havens, even the ones with significant censorship. That said, they have added moderation hurdles with commercial spam, illegal content and ban evasion.
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“Centrism” isn’t really a position one can have… what you mean is “in support of the status quo” which is IMHO also right leaning as it is inherently conservative.
This is why we need more diversity of thought
its true?
Literally described as being a community of “leftists”
I know, is there a lemmy look alike for idk centrists and for everyone else? I just created a voat account and was surprised by what I saw on r/askvoat. https://www.voat.xyz/viewpost?postid=626ee17071e64
I would choose lemmy anyday over that shit
If you’re not keen on seeing posts from “right” leaning extremist, I’m not sure where to point you. “Centrist” communities are going to let that stuff slide, and obviously “right” focused communities are just going to be the most insane things you’ve ever seen
If you aren’t a “Trump’s America” apologist, you’re best bet is to just find a “left” community of people that largely aren’t extremists. Lemmy is fine, HexBear is okay… not sure what else though
I am actually a supporter of Trump’s policies, although he is not fit to lead US after Jan 6. not a fucking racist like those folks at voat. I wonder what brings that out. That site makes me puke. Thanks for the reply tho. My respect for Lemmy greatly increased after visiting voat.
oh well, the centrist is really just a right winger, how shocking
I am not a centrist, I want to be in a platform with them.
I’m trying to extend Reddit’s /r/moderatepolitics to !moderatepolitics@sopuli.xyz. The Reddit community isn’t centrist per se, but more tries to produce a forum with a baseline level of respect during discussions. There are a pretty decent variety of viewpoints represented in the Reddit community, clustering vaguely in the ideological center. The outpost on Lemmy is currently dead, but that can change. :)
although he is not fit to lead US after Jan 6
Jan 6 didn’t just magically happen in isolation. Trump, through his public speeches, actively encouraged ideas and theories that lead to that. Jan 6 was merely the result, to think of Jan 6 as a thing he and a few thousand people woke up and did one day is not a useful way of analyzing how to avoid it happening again; preventative treatment is the most effective.
I wonder what brings that out.
A bunch of things. Modern Republicans appeal strongly to anti-progressivism (to paraphrase, “we resist the woke leftist socialism of the politically correct Democrats!”), engage in STRONG patriotism and nationalism (keeping “the Mexicans” out) and more so some things like “good people on both sides” and failing to denounce the rise of white nationalist terrorism (intentionally or not) act as dog-whistles and tacit encouragement, so naturally those racist crowds flock to him. In the false binary of Democrat and Republican, their choice is obvious. That clearly doesn’t mean ‘Trump supporters must be racist’, but it’s absolutely no surprise those millions of people flock to him.
Of course, that doesn’t mean Biden is good either. He’s also absolute shit, along with approximately the entire Democrat party (protip: most of the world would consider them center-to-right wing in that dumb left-right spectrum, apart from a couple of small social progressive policies). The electoral system of the US is ineffective, and it’s no surprise people are turning to radical groups in all directions in the past few years.
Trump, through his public speeches, actively encouraged ideas and theories that lead to that. Jan 6
I agree and I felt sad that he did that. He was indifferent or positively ecstatic about the consequences of his speech. He put himself above the nation.
engage in STRONG patriotism and nationalism (keeping “the Mexicans” out) and more so some things like “good people on both sides”
Again, I do think merit based immigration is a good thing, so as long as they want that I am not against them. (thank for the answer, I understand your point broadly. )
Maybe we need a dedicated thread, but “merit-based” immigration is a racist scam. When you go travel abroad with your fancy european/american ID, are you asked for the merits you’re gonna bring to the countries you’re visiting?
Why can i with a french passport travel anywhere in the former french colonies without a visa, while Mali/Senegal/etc citizens require a long process to acquire a visa?
What does it mean to judge people based on their “merit”? How is that evaluated? As someone born in France, should i be evaluated based on my merits too? Why do immigrants who wish to reside in France get indoctrinated/interrogated about about stories and ideas i disagree with as a french person? Why is it ok for me to disagree with the french Empire but not with immigrants?
I don’t in absolute (and in isolation from other questions) disagree with the principle of chosen immigration. If we lived in an autonomous community and could only sustain 200 people, we’d have to be careful who we let in and how they can help the community thrive. But “chosen” immigration on a country-scale in some of the richest countries on earth where there’s millions of empty dwellings and tons of wasted food is just a racist scam.
What would attract you about this idea? Why do you feel like it’s even needed in the first place?
PS: See, we can have debates here on lemmy.ml too :P :P
Lemmy the platform is diverse, lemmy.ml is not, but it doesn’t pretend to be. Did you look at the list of instances on https://join-lemmy.org/instances when choosing which one to join?
I guess it depends on the type of content do you want to engage in and what type of political discourse are you looking to engage in. Exploding-heads.com and wolfballs.com might be options, and beehaw.org has a politics section if you feel the need to engage. Also consider what instances the server blocks via the instances link at the bottom of the page when visiting.
Personally id love to see generalist instances push political discourse to gotalkitout https://gtio.io/c/politics which is a instance dedicated to discussion and currently does not block any instance.
I think the generalist ones like gtio.io are a solid idea, providing a mixing pot. That said, hope it doesn’t get a culture shock and become the classical ‘free speech’ case where it’s mostly just populated by people who feel censored elsewhere.
I also like the concept of ‘no politics, no exceptions’ communities, where that is appropriate (e.g. cat pictures). If I want serious politics, I’ll go to a political discussion community instead of seeing people shoehorn their agenda into comments.
me too bruh!
Hmm, I fear that most right-wing spaces are like this. You could stay here and just not follow any of the more radical subs?
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Just tell me why lemmy.ml should necessarily be ideologically diverse? To be in permanent chaos and useless fights? I think there is already plenty of such platforms…
Yeah just move to twitter if you want permanent fighting
You might be right, I do understand your point. Healthy disagreement is not alive anymore. But I think having a community dedicated to letists only can be a bad idea in that it can make sure your beliefs are not questioned. I have thought myself as a socialist and I have thought myself as a anarcho-capitalist, I don’t believe in either anymore. I think if radical views go unchecked they might cause problems.
better to learn than simply believe ;-)
You’re missing an essential part: Marxists are the only ones who can view society in a scientific light. It’s like being frustrated that everyone on a community knows so much about a topic, it doesn’t really make sense to be frustrated about. What, when you say something dumb are people too happy and fast to correct you? If you want to feel smart start interacting with YouTube comments, if you want to learn then maybe understand what the actual diverse viewpoints here understand about the world.
It is mostly communist, and that is very good
and as an anti-communist, I might have different views
And so we do not care. Orwell was a fascist, and we all know what that means.
Why would you consider yourself anti-communist? If you mean you’re against absolute raw State power ruining our lives (like in the USSR) i very much agree, but communism can exist without coercion and State power. In fact, i would argue there was no Communism under the USSR and communism (stateless, classless society) is still a worthy goal.
but communism can exist without coercion and State power.
How could that ever happen, I mean above the size of some small communes?
This has nothing to do with communism. I’m not aware of any large societies that aren’t organized this way regardless of what political system they subscribe to.
There have been many proposals, such as a confederation of communes, but the real question is why would you even want large states? Through out history these inherently imperial states have caused nothing but suffering and war.
why would you even want large states?
Even if not states, we need some form of large-scale organisation, especially when we are facing global challenges (like climate changing) that require a global response.
Looking at the response to climate change so far, I think it is safe to say that the large states have been an active hindrance. Way too much geopolitics standing in the way of coming together and jointly working on the problem.
why would you even want large states?
That is true. I wonder what sort of a system would prevent that. It seems like states are always in a constant need to grow, like cancer.
And even those states that do not need to grow are doing everything they can to stop the parts they already have from separating. For some reason even the most peaceful nations seem to think that secession is a good reason to bring the military in and at least make not very subtle threats that it will lead to killing people.
Those rules apply to lemmy.ml, not to lemmy as a whole. For example, I’m in sopuli.xyz, and these are its rules.
You have a lot of options. Reddit, Twitter, (far-)right Lemmy instances like bakchodi.org and wolfballs.
When I considered myself a communist (17 year old me) I thought opposing views really changed my mind.
When I was a 17 year old I was a complete pro USA centre-rightist that believed in heavily conservative Republican/Taliban views of women and who took pride in eating the new McDonalds burger on the menu. I believed in having a nice Instagram profile (which I never worked on) and believed Reddit was the frontpage encyclopedia of internet. I believed in a load of horseshit things like capitalism is a great thing for the world. Turns out, I am no longer 17, and we all change. Now I am a privacy advocate who also advocates critical thinking, attempts to bust lies wherever possible, and am far-left leaning, because I see the duopoly of liberal centrism and rightwing in a capitalist framework as the true cause of society’s exploitation and downfall.
I’m going to paste my comment from a similar topic:
I find that conversation flourishes when you limit it to a certain degree. In spaces which are completely open and have a massive range of opinion, what you’ll find is mostly yelling at each other over broad talking points that everyone is already familiar with. After a while, nothing of interest comes out of the far left clashing with the far right all the time. But when you limit it, time can be spent doing other things than yelling at the dickhead on the other side who you have little to no overlap with and see as a dire enemy. You can talk about nuances in principles, differences in organizing, etc. It makes for richer, more interesting conversation.
There’s also quite a huge range within the umbrella of leftism, and honestly we already have a huge enough gap there that there’s a lot of worthless clashing. Broadening that would only make the site worse.
I understand what you are saying. Echo Chambers are absolutely dangerous.
People need to be exposed to views that don’t necessarily align with theirs. That way they can expand their viewpoint.
Having said that, this is just one site among many. Not every website has to hold multiple views. Taking the internet as a whole, there are a variety of websites that people can get differing opinions and viewpoints.
Now that I think about it, it sounds good in theory but I know many far-right people that don’t attempt to look for alternative sources. They just keep delving down the same Rabbit Hole instead of looking for differing views. So you might be on to something.
very diverse… got communist, anarchist, but everyone speak english
also, this has been broufht up b4 and is getting a rather dull
admin mark this as duplicate and close it
You don’t solve a problem by ignoring it.
everyone being a communist or anarchist is not a problem
I see everyone being a communist as perfect K.O. victory.
Being in a bubble is a problem. It’s how you get things like QAnon. It’s also how you get extremely out of touch with the rest of society.
You mean when you have “leftists” doing free-labor propaganda for one of the wealthiest imperialist leaders on Earth (Putin)? :D
i don’t really like this bubble theory. It’s important to have a comfort zone where you can express yourself freely, and that’s incompatible with a fully open-door policy (no moderation). In the global north, people complaining about filter bubbles are really complaining about people escaping from the majority view, which is a feature not a bug.
But i agree with you that some places to meet/debate is very good. Nobody was born anarchist or queer, and only through debate and praxis can we evolve to become better versions of ourselves. Hell, i’ve met some right-wingers in my life who were much more left-wing than some communists (i said some)…
I would agree that having a comfortable space is healthy, especially for minority opinions. The problem comes when people mostly or entirely stay in an extremist minority space. They become highly separated from the mainstream, but then wonder why their ideas that everyone around them agrees with aren’t being put into practice. We saw this with people who couldn’t believe that Biden won because everyone around them supported Trump.
Oh, you’re a capitalist? Show me your vast swaths of capital then
Do you have a warrant? :')
What should be an approach for this alleged lack of diversity? Lemmy is an open platform where everyone can join, not restricted to any personal characteristic, and assume the identity that best matches them.
So, IMHO, there is no problem to solve.
Second follow up - There is a good question here in that you want to engage on the lemmy platform, but did not necessarily land on the right server. I note that if you try to sign up on lemmy.ml it states at the top of the sign up page Before you register on lemmy.ml, please have a look at Joinlemmy to see if there is an instance that better fits your region, language or interests. Did you look at this page or go past and quickly jump on to see what things were about. Did you look at the content posted on lemmy.ml before deciding to join?
this instance may not be, but the fediverse is. that’s kinda the whole point.
Ultimately, Lemmy is a Reddit clone and one problem with Reddit-like platforms is the upvote/downvote system heavily promotes groupthink since dissenting opinions are downvoted into oblivion while consensus opinions are promoted. Lemmy attempts to solve this problem by being open source, self-hostable, and federated (which are all great things), but these aspects alone can’t totally solve the inherent groupthink problem, it just makes it easier for those with differing views to spin off and start their own instances, which will likely have their own groupthink.
As politically centrist myself, I’ve basically just unsubscribed from the political communities and focus on the more tech-related ones. If an apolitical or more centrist political Lemmy instance which federated with lemmy.ml was started there’s a good chance I’d join.
It’s an interesting point, but what’s the alternative? Activity-based ranking like forums and imageboards might be appealing, although it is worth acknowledging they naturally bias towards controversy, for better or worse. Probably worse for a ‘centrist’, which is a relative non-term but I assume it means pro-status quo liberalism who doesn’t like radical ideas.
You can actually set that up on Lemmy’s front page (not comments) by using that New Comment sorting, but that’s not a default anywhere so its not relevant unless an instance chooses it as a default.
Anyway, groupthink is an interesting problem in the case of recuperation and ‘sanewashing’ of ideas. reddit’s /r/antiwork is a prime example: it was initially anarchists who wanted to abolish the concept of work (not necessarily labor) as we know it, but it became popular and reddit’s pro-capitalism pro-liberal groupthink got to the point where their founding(?) moderator’s views, congruent with the resources in the sidebar, caused massive outrage. Like you said, dissent and discussion is overwhelmed by funny memes and fulfilling anecdotes.
I agree that pointing out the problem is far easier than finding a good solution. I don’t think activity-based sorting is much better since, as you said, that just tends to promote the most outrageous content. Facebook and Twitter-like platforms suffer from that issue more than Reddit-like platforms do. In short, I don’t have a good solution and I acknowledge the benefits of the upvote/downvote system (such as outrageous and irrelevant content being filtered out by the community without the need for as much active moderation), but it is a poor tool for fostering civil, ideologically diverse communities.
Same. I thought to myself there are better things than politics to focus on. But yes, groupthink is a problem with such platforms.
