Fediverse

Lemmy is the definition of a left-wing echo chamber. We all see it and if you downvote me for pointing this out - you are lying to yourself.

It is very rigid in its ideologies, even more so than reddit.

There are many posts preaching for the choir, but I wouldn't call it an echo chamber. It's more like a dead sound chamber where the ideas dies in agreement. It doesn't bounce off the walls or resonate. It's already there so no answer is required.

Lemmy would benefit from more users playing the devil's lawyer, but I think it's too small for anyone to use their main profile for that, and alt-accounts would quickly get blocked or banned.

Actual users with opposing views wouldn't be of much help. Politics isn't very nuanced these days. It's not red or blue, left or right or whatever. It's polarized into a new duality: Those that give a shit and those who are proud idiots. Lemmy is on the good side of this and will not benefit from being more accepting of idiots.

I don't consider myself leftist or rightist. I flip both ways on different issues and the middle on other things.

How ever Lemmy is becoming less tolerant of jokes and any view that doesn't line up with a moderator's view on the world.

It took a long time for me to get a ban but it's happened a couple times now.

Admittedly they're from .ml

Though some more left leaning communities have gone full on dog like as though it's Reddit

I have noticed this trend. On the one hand, "Truth has a liberal bias" has always been true. If a community is geared towards truth and evidence, like as not it will lean left. There is copious evidence for this, for any random topic.

On the other hand, it has resulted in a lot of "I downvote complexity" behavior, which is, in my view, problematic. It is very easy to take stances of ideological purity online, and behave as if any recognition of greater complexity is EVIL!!1! I see this again and again. This is a way to make your ideological movement irrelevant and unworkable.

As much as folks decry the rigor of the MAGA right, where fealty to Trump is the only virtue, the Progressive left exhibits the exact same rigor, the exact same intolerance for deviation from its allies. Both Progressives and MAGAts see this as a virtue, but it very much is not: it locks you into a worldview that eliminates important complexity and any ability to see things from alternate perspectives. If you have a belief that your perspective is the only correct one, then the vast majority of the time, you're wrong.

Given that in the US leftist perspectives on anything are few and hard to come by, I welcome Lemmy's primarily leftist slant on things. Should one want to get a fascist or center/center right perspective, pretty much everything in the mass media in the US will provide that.

Since my (leftist) instance is blocked, OP probably can't even read this comment.

That irony aside, although I disagree that federated Lemmy as a whole is homogenous, it's only natural that an alternative social network would skew away from the mainstream, and that instances would be relatively homogenous internally.

I believe this is by design, but to expect something else is unrealistic. The only options for Lemmy would be for it to be either further left or further right than Reddit. And there are a couple fascist instances, though they are blocked.

There's a lot of stuff written on this topic, but I haven't seen this mentioned yet: there are conservative instances on Lemmy, as a platform. Most of them are widely defederated, not necessarily for the views of the majority (though in some cases, yes), but because of asshats deliberately causing trouble.

Unfortunately, this is also a product of a wider shift in discourse by the right (understood in a North American context), which appeals mostly to edgelords rather than the (rapidly shrinking, already shrunk to the point of irrelevance/non-existence one could argue) thinking, at least ostensibly humanistic conservative.

There's self-selection in action here. Which makes sense, even if I also find it troubling (there are people who can be reasoned with drowned out by Nazi assholes, who are willing to hear people out on the not-Nazi stuff, give positive reinforcement and with it a home to get radicalized).

I don't have a good answer, and if I did I'd probably be up for a Nobel Prize given how wide and damaging the problem is. It ain't just here - it's pretty much anywhere anyone expresses any idea. I just happen to like this side of the Threadiverse much more, so it's where I hang out.

Only real hope is meatspace, imo. And even then, not everyone has the privilege to engage this way in meatspace without a direct risk to their personal safety (see POC, our trans brothers and sisters, LGTBQ+ folks, etc.).

As a leftist myself (communist), I generally enjoy the content and discussions on Lemmy.

go back to Reddit nerd

You sure you’re a leftist? I see more leftism allowed to exist on Lemmy than other platforms, but the majority of it certainly leans neoliberal.

Try criticizing NATO or the Democrats in Lemmy communities. See how fast the powermods and groupthink kick in to put a stop to it.