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.
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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