Yet.

315 points

There’s also the fact that there isn’t an algorithm trying to keep you doomscrolling by promoting commercial content.

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70 points

I think this is a huge part of it. Occasionally I’ll surf Facebook after checking out the marketplace. Last night I saw tons of posts about that “Try that in a small town” song with tons of people claiming to support it. Just post after post of people saying they don’t see anything racist about it at all, and not a single one pointing out how showing videos of the BLM protests while singing “we take care of our own, try that in a small town” miiiiiiiight just be a little bit racist. Fortunately I usually only click on cat videos and the rare left leaning recommended posts, so I got to see one post with a picture of John Cougar Mellencamp saying something like “I sang about my small town without mentioning violence.” The post had hundreds of comments…all deleted by admins.

Even when you try to avoid the controversy and hateful comments, the system is still designed to keep you doomscrolling. Positivity doesn’t help that…

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5 points

I need eye bleach - I googled that song and wished I didn’t. You don’t even need to go to a small town - you go 5 feet outside of ANY city in US and everyone suddenly has a Southern accent and half of the people have Confederate flags. My 5 year old was with her mom in a peaceful protest and the fucking sheriff teargassed the group - she didn’t get hit by the teargas but she did almost get crushed by the panicking crowd. Fuck these people. Sorry about the “negativity.” But fuck.

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44 points

This is underrated. I actually close Lemmy a lot easier and more quickly than I did reddit, it’s not hooking me with dopamine hits nearly as strongly.

As a result, since I know I’ll probably just scroll for a few minutes at a time, I’m more willing to check in more often and toss a few upvotes and maybe a comment or two around.

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18 points

Yep this is huge. I still scroll on RiF sometimes without being logged in, and I had only ever looked at the subs I was subscribed to until now. I’m shocked by how much infuriating nonsense is being pushed by the site.

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261 points

Lemmy is so far left leaning because a large part of its existence is due to people being mad at capitalism

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30 points
*

And its so tiring to hear about all the time

Edit: and I don’t disagree

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27 points

I agree with it, but I also agree with you

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17 points

“I disagree with the bad thing, but I wish the people affected by the bad thing wouldn’t complain about it so much!”

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7 points

I’m real tired of hearing about Lemmy and Reddit. I just want the other content that I used to consume here. I’m getting pretty tired of hearing how bad Reddit is doing.

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4 points

It’s like someone coming out of an abusive relationship. Every other sentence is about the awful things they did, how good it is to be away, and did you hear about xyz thing they did.

It’s exhausting.

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1 point

You can subscribe to subs that don’t talk about it and unsubscribe from the ones that do.

There will be a lot of growing pains as communities take time to migrate over, discuss the drama, have new communities created, seeing over time which ones are moderated in ways you enjoy.

Tldr: take it easy, you and the communities will sort themselves out in time.

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1 point

Capitalism doesn’t tire!

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-122 points
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Removed by mod
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68 points

developed by socialists

I thought only capitalism drives innovation?

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45 points

Strangely enough, many people do things for other reasons than money. :)

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15 points

it does, in the fields of exploitation sciences, also known as orthodox micro economics

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11 points

Freedom and personal liberty drives innovation more than anything else.

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7 points

Capitalism drives dependance tho. Not a socialist but capitalism is terrible as well. Lemmy is created by free software and open source software enthusiasts. This means that code is public, its for everyone, and anyone can use it woth or without modification.

Some people think this is communism

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43 points
*

more like we wanted out of the colonial capitalist echo chamber so we could hear ourselves think.

nice try though

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4 points

It can be both. You cannot argue that Lemmy is devoid of echo chambers.

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13 points

You know people can have strong ideals and still have the humanity to help people who may disagree with them? Not everything is run by political ideology.

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3 points

That’s not how it started, Lemmy started way back from r/redditalternatives with Ellen Pao fiasco.

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89 points

Thinking like this is why people get surprised when right leaning parties get voted for in elections

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48 points
*

Lol right? “Right wing politics only seem popular because of bots”. No, left wing politics only seem popular on social media because old people dont use it, despite making up the majority of many populations, and often times are the only people who actually vote in elections.

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9 points

Left wing politics are more popular in the real world than they are in real world governments. The thing is that extremely online youth have absolutely no idea of just how far left they are.

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1 point

Left wing politics only seems popular on social media because social media can and does ban people for right wing opinions.

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79 points

Not really. I mean that “because…” part.

Leftism is inherenty tied to technology, especially new. It’s part of its lifestyle. EVERY new, massive social “site” (or online service) is expected to be left-leaning by default. It may later change its political viewpoint, but in its relative infancy it’s left.

Rightism is more about actions taking place in real-world. As such, the technology isn’t perceived as more than a tool, used for specific purpose only, rather than part of, or the foundation of a lifestyle.

…and of course there’s a plethora of alternative political views, options and convictions that are a mix of either extremes of the spectrum - if you meet a person online, it shouldn’t be surprisied to learn about “pro-life”, but also “anti-Trump” and similarly puzzling approaches to various aspects of life.

tl;dr: it’s not about bots. It’s because Lemmy/Mastodon isn’t popular enough to serve as a tool for right-wing politics.

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54 points

Leftism is inherenty tied to technology, especially new.

I don’t know, there has always been a huge libertarian contingent of the tech industry as well. I’m not sure which is bigger. I hope the leftism.

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27 points

Yeah crypto bros aren’t exactly leftist, neither is the hypercapitalist Silicon Valley crowd, and I’ve encountered plenty of other tech enthusiasts with worrying opinions.

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9 points
*

I feel that comment is on the vibe of “liberals are leftists”.

Edit: “that comment” as in the one above the one I’m replying to…

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24 points

Libertarians are not leftists.

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13 points

I’d say I’m generally conservative and have been dabbling in alternative social media for a number of years. Some of the biggest Mastodon instances are/were right leaning. Gab.ai started off as a proprietary site and then migrated to Mastodon. Truth.social was always based on Mastodon. I’ve never been active on them because I don’t like echo chambers though. I’ve never really had a desire to have my thoughts reaffirmed by strangers…

I would assume they’re presence isn’t felt in the fediverse because the concept of de-federating is working? Gab is likely cut off by others and truth social never federated with others to begin with. I don’t think Truth ever intended to though, and really just wanted something they didn’t have to build from scratch.

The only Mastodon instance I actually have an account with now is somewhat right leaning but it’s not their emphasis. Even then I’m not too active on it.

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12 points

From what I gather, Mastodon attracts little attention in conservative circles.

One of main reasons I’ve heard is that “there’s hardly anyone to talk with”. Beats me if it’s default, general conservative opinion…

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5 points

Thanks to Big tech censorship, there are lots of people who are more anti-establishment right on the fediverse. Lots of fairly large instances. Some of them are real nasty pieces of work filled with folks dropping n bombs and swastikas, some of them are filled with some of the sweetest religious right folks you ever met in your life.

I think one of the biggest differences is that you don’t have the Jerry Springer algorithm trying to match up a bunch of black people with a bunch of KKK members. Most far right instances don’t defederate anyone, but many of the far left instances defederate the moment anyone looks at them funny so despite sharing a platform, typically there just isn’t that much engagement between the two groups. In the middle of there are instances that are more than happy to federate with both as long as they aren’t too big of jerks.

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1 point

I mean, they’re there to talk to… If you like jacking each other off… I don’t.

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3 points

Both of those sites have been ostracized (defederated) from the mastodon fediverse. The mastodon fediverse is in general quite left.

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1 point

Yes, I said that. Well technically I said Gab was. Truth was so forked I don’t believe there was even an option to defederate them. They intended on a walled garden on their own.

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8 points

Agree with this ,RW is having an elongasm on twitter while most of my lefties moved to mastodon

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69 points

I dont think that is the case. Left leaning people are just much less accepting of authority, so there are more likely to move of of reddit. right leaning people also tend to be more conservative, so they are more likely to stay on there old platforms.

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31 points

There have been many right-wing exodus from reddit over the years. All of them have centered around a perceived “free speech” issue, and they have always flocked to the most promising alternatives (e.g. Voat). Obviously Lemmy with its origins was never seen as particularly appealing for that crowd. This time the issue just happened to touch the left-leaning part more.

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18 points

Probably also explains why Lemmy is doing well.

Knock on wood, but Lemmy’s grown to the point now that it almost completely replaces Reddit for me. The only reason I still stop by Reddit is for more niche fandoms that haven’t taken off here quite yet.

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5 points

Yeah, there’s that one shitty instance pretty much everyone defederated from a week or two ago.

It’s actually one of the oldest instances, over a year old. Because the worst far right trolls that got ip banned from reddit came here when they couldn’t make a new account on reddit.

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2 points

I’m a right winger here for free speech reasons

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12 points

Come on I don’t think so. Lemmy was a left leaning platform since the beginning.

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5 points

Well that’s still the same point though. Lemmy and the fediverse are all about rejecting the authority of centralized services/social media.

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1 point

How in the world do you figure left leaning people are less accepting of authority?

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0 points

I think it’s a different political dimension entirely isn’t it? You have left vs right economics, and then authoritarian vs libertarian governance. I don’t buy into that stupid political compass, but the axes do seem accurate.

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-13 points
Deleted by creator
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No, it’s just a matter of who they accept as legitimate “authority”.

If the Dumbass-in-Chief, their ministers, and their news had all told them to wear masks, they absolutely would have, but every single one of their primary authority sources were pulling in different directions and they don’t accept any “liberal” sources as legitimate authority. You can see it at a much smaller scale by looking at Church congregation sizes where some ministries focused on trying to protect their elderly and infirm members and those who didn’t.

Conservatives who had pastors who told them to wear masks were a LOT more likely to do so than ones who were getting mixed messaging.

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2 points

Remember when their Dumbass-in-chief told them to get vaccinated and they booed him?

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12 points

I didn’t follow mask mandates because I was required to or told to by any authority. I did it because it was the right thing to do based on the science, and still is (which is why I still mask up in enclosed or busy spaces).

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13 points

If you’re old enough to remember when seat belt laws started/became more prevalent, you’ll remember the right-leaning folks were all up in arms because “muh freedom to do what I want if it doesn’t hurt anyone else” not realizing (or not caring about) the effect their choices had on their children. While center/left leaning people were just like “I already wear it because it’s the smart thing to do”.

More recent example: smoking bans

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1 point

I don’t use a mask currently, but if transmission levels of the flu or COVID were notably above average in my city I absolutely would wear one indoors. I think with really busy indoor places I’d just find something else entirely. I don’t know how I was ever okay with level of crowd density.

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2 points

People on the “right” are vastly more accepting of authority than people on the left. For example, the people who didn’t wear masks were willing to die because Tucker (or whichever right-wing shitgoblin they listen to) told them to. It wasn’t some sort of anti-authoritarian expression, it was pure authoritarianism.

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2 points
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If we’re talking about acceptance of authority, right leaning folks are less likely to do so

Right-wingers love authority, especially if it’s the kind they approve of. It’s literally part of the ideology. A lot of them didn’t wear masks because the right-wing grifters (like Tucker) told them not too.

Wearing masks during the pandemic was just smart, common sense and had nothing to do with authority, in spite of the right-wingers trying to make it seem like it was.

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Showerthoughts

!showerthoughts@lemmy.world

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A “Showerthought” is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you’re doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.

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