I don't interact with the various other Lemmy instances very often. I see almost no point in it, it's just reddit. All they post is endless articles from the Atlantic or Wall Street journal. Elon musk this, orange man that, all useless, pointless posting.
Recently, their favorite flavor of slop has been the "Tiananmen square massacre". This has brought out the worst in them. We live rent free in their heads, but especially whenever a socialist government is mentioned. They all come crawling out of their basements, pushing Funko pops and copies of Hogwarts legacy out of the way of their crusty, rainbow light keyboards to claim their knowledge of a Chinese protest is infallible.
My god do they not let up either. Any rebuttal is shut down by these drones. Any mention of "what about the Americans many war crimes?" Activates their inner CIA sleeper agent, and they hit you with "commies are just whataboutism. That's all they have. Well at least we have freedom. At least we aren't committing genocide." All extremely easy to debunk claims.
Don't get me started on isr*el. They sure do love their ethnic cleansing. More so than even the loudest of American Republicans I've ever heard. To them, Gaza is all "terrorists". They should all be killed in their eyes, their only hope of redemption is "non violent protest", aka, just lay down and die. Never in my life have I seen a larger group of far right genocidal freaks than I have on Lemmy world.
It's so ridiculous, it's comical. Say something like "hey this is misinformation" and a thousand replies will hit your inbox, all from dudes that post things like "Hamas needs to be destroyed", "people who don't vote shouldn't complain about anything" and my personal favorite one "Uh actually, I support the maori MPs getting suspended for doing the haka. That stupid dance is disruptive" (Yeah, real comments, not hyperbole)
The Nazis are in our backyard. And they should be bullied back to reddit where they belong.
Reddit was populated for a while before the crisis of liberalism really sunk in. It wasn't a website with a particular politics beyond the mainstream (biased towards white computer touchers obviously). It operates under a corporate media model which aims to be unoffensive (to potential advertisers and investors, specifically). The crop of alternative social media platforms which have launched since 2017 are a completely different breed. In the hands of liberals, they are operated under the assumption that an epistemological crisis is what's fueling the global turn towards fascism. In an effort to combat this epistemological crisis, they have circled their wagons around the liberal institutions which are supposed to be responsible for safeguarding and delivering the truth - academia and journalism, as well as the institutions of "democracy," which the "truth" is meant to sustain.
They operate under the mindset that liberal democracy is hanging on by a thread, and that any criticism (or worse! Lack of respect) of these institutions undermines them, and undermines liberal democracy itself. With the enemies at the gate, any setback for the US is a setback for democracy. The scandalous positions (and omissions) of the Papers Of Record must be embraced uncritically, because if people lose faith in "journalism," disinformation prevails. The end result is places like lemmy.world, where liberals find much more safety and comfort in naked imperialism than they do in a thorough examination of the manifold chronic institutional failures which led us to where we are today.
While Reddit may be irredeemable on the whole, it has the potential to surprise you occasionally. It is different from these new platforms where the userbase is much more ideologically self-selected, and where dissidents are accurately identified as enemies, rather than a potential marketing category for vendors advertising Che Guevara t-shirts.
I realize this comment is too late for a lot of people to still see, but I have to add something about reddit, unless we fall into the trap of erasing some of its terrible history because they have been trying to memoryhole it as hard as possible.
CW: Pedophiles, sexual violence
I don't think this is entirely true. In the early stages of reddit it was already more aligned with the kind of libertarian
brainworms to the point that I remember normie liberals and people on older sites (including fucking 4chan) were oftentimes repulsed by it.
Initially the main thing reddit was doing to set itself apart from other sites was to not "censor" communities like r/jailbait and various reddits dedicated to taking upskirt creepshots. The former was a community dedicated to sexualising actual, real-life, children and to post images and videos of them for people to masturbate to.
Reddit did eventually cave and remove the very fucking worst shit on it and then pivoted hard to being the inoffensive. investor-friendly site for white keyboard touchers as you said, but I don't think the truly awful shit they started out with should be forgotten either.
Exactly, .world is way more hivemind than reddit could ever hope to be. I've seen many more communist and actual leftists post on reddit than lemmy. Go through any of their comment history, it's all stuff that teeters on the edge of being outright racist. And they have the gall to claim that all communists are racists.
Hey sorry, what system do you believe in? Imperialism? Oh ok, yeah, totally not a racist ideology. They are so party loyal it's insane. They truly believe they could vote away America's fascist elements.
"Let's vote for the genocide supporting cop guys! She's better than the orange man! I'm not racist, I just think those silly brown people in Palestine should stop complaining!"
Vile mutts. These are the kinds of people that plunged the Soviet Union into crisis and ruined millions of lives because they "had to be free*.
I completely agree with you and this is a spot on OP and comment, but just a little nit to pick... my hackles raise when I see "mutt" used as an insult. I'm sure I don't have to explain why a word that means "mixed breed" has had a problematic past. I know you didn't mean it that way, just trying to point out in a friendly way that all of us, myself included, would do well to examine our language.
Chat, let me know if im being too pedantic.
Edit:
liberalism.
Also, for what it's worth, I was recently pointing out in one of the threads lamenting the death of .ee how much worse .world is than lemm.ee and that even though we see a lot of idiot libs from .ee due to federation, it is .world that is successfully seeking to be reddit 2.0 and in doing so has amplified everything wrong with
I appreciate calling out terms like this on this site, so that I can immediately see the warning instead of internalizing it without thinking
Good post.