as a person that came from the 3rd world country and new in fediverse environment, i genuinely would like to know about this.
edit: thanks for the replies! sorry, i literally don’t know the reason since i’m not a western lol. twitter/x is too biased especially when musk openly supports trump so i came here and seeing fediverse is mostly are harris or biden (when he’s still up for the candidate) supporters. don’t know about reddit tho, i only use reddit as a forum for linux and programming stuff.
I think a lot of the people on Lemmy came from Reddit when the whole API thing happened. It was pretty much a boycott. I assume most of the people who cared enough about that to leave were mostly left-leaning.
That’s why I’m here, at least.
Edit: not sure about Mastodon, though
Reddit chased away the Trump supporters before the API thing happened. When it did, some people like me who are classic-liberals and libertarians also came over. After all, Lemmy is an inherently libertarian platform even when its users aren’t. When I express a political opinion objectionable to leftists, I get several times more down-votes than up-votes but I do get up-votes.
Lemmy is an inherently libertarian platform
This is an interesting perception, because if you mean American libertarianism then this doesn’t really make sense. Lemmy’s creators are communist and intended it to be anti-corporate. It is designed in a decentralized manner specifically to avoid situations where companies can own and profit from it.
The kinds of platforms I would see as being libertarian (in the American sense) are the diaspora of privately owned social media companies.
Not all libertarian-leaning people are on board with corporatism; IMO freedom is for people, not businesses.
If it’s libertarian it’s libertarian socialist. There’s no property or capital on here, posts get boosted by collective voting, not based off your following or account. There’s not even an idea of karma, your account means basically nothing here. A capitalist libertarian social media would be something like nostr or what bluesky is claiming it’ll eventually do where you completely own your account and your following and you can use that social capital as you wish.
I think this is an example of where the left-right axis isn’t the most adequate way of viewing things. The Fediverse in general is anti-authoritarian. You can be all the way from a far-left anarchist to a far-right anarcho-capitalist and still be anti-authoritarian, just like both tankies and nazis are authoritarian.
As a libertarian liberal, what communities would you recommend? I’m sad there’s not a more active free speech community on this platform. The reddit one is such a gross conservative circle jerk rn.
I used to call myself a “left libertarian” but to be frank, after learning more I’ve found that “anarchist” fits far better. And there’s a lot of interesting content out there that I enjoy. I’m not sure who all .world has defederated, but the solar punk instance is always great, our mods are great (Midwest social), some people may find them abrasive, but those are people who maybe don’t understand that when you play in someone else’s home, you play by their rules.
Also: blahaj, beehaw, and even hexbear is usually entertaining, even if I have some disagreements with them.
The point is, there’s a lot out there, depending on who you’re federating with.
I don’t have anything to suggest on Lemmy. There’s so little activity that I participate in every community where I see an interesting post, except for those communities which are specifically for people with some particular set of beliefs which I don’t share.
If you’re looking beyond Lemmy, there are are the comment sections of the SlateStarCodex/AstralCodexTen blog and the blogs it links to as well as some associated forums and subreddits. You’ll find plenty of liberal libertarians and the comments tend to be polite and high-effort, but keep in mind that a dedication to free speech means that people with opinions that can’t be discussed elsewhere participate too. It’s a bit much for me sometimes.
There’s only one way you can support Trump today.
You either refuse to acknowledge all the terrible things he’s done, or you approve of the things he’s done.
People who refuse to acknowledge, are going to look at all the “fake news” on this site about His Oranginess, and quickly decide that it’s nothing but propaganda and go somewhere “more reliable”.
Those who agree, stick around a little longer. They will argue and defend the horrible things, because they think there are more like them that will come out and back them up as a fellow defender of racism misogyny homophobia “Good old family values”. But they will be downvoted to oblivion and have trouble finding a friendly voice. Eventually, they too will go where they can have a more comfortable discussion with people who are as terrible as they are.
And ironically enough, if you went to Truth Social, and asked why there weren’t more Biden/Harris supporters there, they’d give you the exact same answer in reverse.
We had an opportunity years ago to fix this problem. Long before Trump ever showed up on the scenes as a political individual. We needed in schools to be teaching how to pick out real news from fake news. How to pick out fact from propaganda. Hell out to read a newspaper properly.
How to logically pick a part in argument. We chose not to. We as a society, decided not to put our money towards that. Now people read a headline, and based purely on the headline, make a statement such as “throw the guy in jail for the rest of his life for that one “.
I sat on a jury trial. It was a murder trial, if you went purely by what was in the local newspaper, you would’ve seriously questioned why the guy didn’t just take a plea deal. If you sat in that courtroom day after day, listening to it you’d realize this is a lot tougher than what you realize. we had a hard time figuring out if the guy was even in town at the time of the murder.
But for those that weren’t involved in the trial, they’re convinced the guy belonged in jail for the rest of his life. Because people didn’t sit down and really read the newspaper and ask important questions. Because we don’t hold our journalists to a higher standard and force them to give all the information And tell both sides of the story.
I have no idea how you solve the problem anymore. Because at this point, even if you tell the complete truth about any given politician, no one‘s going to believe what they’re reading anymore because there’s another so-called journalist out there saying the exact opposite and people say well I don’t know what to believe then. And can’t figure out how to critically think about this and ask questions.
Here in Lemmy we are guilty of the same sort of thing, same as over at truth social same as over at Twitter same as over Facebook.
As a society, I’m sorry for the language here, we are well and truly fucked.
I truly don’t know what the answer is.
Also sidenote 10 bucks says somebody comes back with a stupid comment of well since you don’t know what the answer is obviously you’re just saying that we shouldn’t do anything and just give up.
If you’ve never watched the movie 12 Angry Men, do yourself a favor and watch it. You are going to love it and it has everything to do with your comment.
Neglecting public education is really going to keep biting us in the ass.
Something like half of US adults can’t read at a sixth grade level.
If we took some of the idiotic venture capitalist “it’s cat gifs on the block chain” nonsense and put it into education and infrastructure, we’d be so much better off.
I don’t really know how to get from here to there, either. Give me magic powers to Thanos snap away some people, maybe?
I have no idea how you solve the problem anymore. Because at this point, even if you tell the complete truth about any given politician, no one‘s going to believe what they’re reading anymore because there’s another so-called journalist out there saying the exact opposite and people say well I don’t know what to believe then. And can’t figure out how to critically think about this and ask questions.
Reverse cargo cult.
We needed in schools to be teaching how to pick out real news from fake news.
Obviously there are issues with education in this country but it’s always an easy scapegoat for these kinds of issues. Plenty of states have skills like this in their common core, I would venture to say you’re incorrect on that point.
Fair enough I graduated in the early 90s at that time we didn’t have it. At least not at the level that I felt that we should’ve. If I’m wrong on that, then I apologize.
You either refuse to acknowledge all the terrible things he’s done, or you approve of the things he’s done.
This is two ways. You literally said either / or.
No! I have been defeated!! I now have no choice but to vote Republican! Damn you, Orbituary! <Fist waves dramatically>
Reddit’s early days were also far more left leaning then they eventually became.
When you have a small niche of nerds who enjoy discussing topics and ideas, then far right wing points will get downvoted to hell because they are, quite frankly, dumb, divorced from logic and the real world, and don’t stand up to actual critical scrutiny.
Reddit got more right leaning as it grew and expanded into the general population and more dummies started upvoting dumb posts, then got more right leaning when right wing political orgs took notice and started trying to influence it, and now seems even more right leaning because they’ve changed their algorithms to prioritize controversial comments and posts that get people angry because it boosts engagement.
While very true, dont discount apathy and lurking. I may have made 15-20 comments on reddit for tge 10+ yrs I was on the platform. There were so many ppl 1. That typically someone else would respond. Two reddit descended into ppl who just want to argue semantics. Here without the karma farming people have more genuine responses
Over on mastodon on the other hand… I get the feeling people brought some of the negative aspects of twitter over there. Still overwhelmingly positive but I tend to get more info on lemmy now than mastodon Imo
I don’t think there’s any less karma farming on here. People still look at their up and downvotes, and I don’t think there was a legitimate industry for selling high karma accounts on Reddit. Not one that would make a difference at scale anyways.
The problem with Mastodon and Twitter is structural, it’s based around following people, not topics. It is inherently problematic because a) personalities and status get elevated over the logic of the argument, b) following people instead of topics inherently feeds people’s egos in a problematic way, and c) a given person can use their followers problematically (brigading, etc). On Reddit / Lemmy by following decentralized topics it eliminates or reduces most of these effects, though the mods controlling each subreddit can exercise some of the same influence.
The problem with Mastodon and Twitter is structural, it’s based around following people, not topics.
I’ve long thought this but infrequently find other people who think the same!
On here (and reddit, rip) and most forums, I don’t really look at the user name. I just read the content I think that’s a better setup.
Most likely your instance is defederated from all the nazi-adjacent instances 🤷
Yeah. It’s the advantage but also disadvantage of the Fediverse. If you’re on the wrong instance you won’t even notice that certain ideologies are right out blocked by the instance owner. This can go into all political directions. You wouldn’t even notice this happening unless you do research on which instances are blocked by yours.
That’s the thing. On one hand I like not being bombarded by the shit opinions but on the other I like being informed at what the talking points are (to a degree) because I find that keeps me sharp against the opposition. When I read or hear about conservative viewpoints, I only think about how obtuse the logic is so it’s not something I worry at all about affecting my mindspace so this might not be a solution to everyone.
I’m still torn on the topic since it’s nice to not give a platform to obviously shit ideals since that’s how the misinformation spreads but I still wonder if there’s an even better protocol out there we haven’t been able to even comprehend yet.
“Without echo chambers, the weak trump supporter gets bullied and humiliated, leaving defeated and confused back to his herd. Nature is beautiful. “
David Attenborough, maybe
It’s insane. I left reddit because I thought it was an over-moderated echo chamber with too much corporate influence. Lemmy is somehow an even worse echo chamber and it didn’t need corporate influence to see it happen.
