I don’t have much of a problem either way as I don’t think I’ll be engaging in political discussion on this website past this post but it seems like any sort of non-left wing opinions or posts are immediately trashed on here. That’s fine. There’s clearly a more liberal audience here and that’s okay. I just don’t want Lemmy to become a echo chamber for any side and it seems to be that way when it comes to politics already.
Mostly making this post just to drum up discussion as I’m new here.
Edit: Thanks for the rational replies. I was expecting to get lit up for even mentioning this topic lol.
I’m not sure why “I don’t want to see a space become an echo chamber” is always what gets said. Everywhere else IS a right wing echo chamber for the most part? Conservatives aren’t the ones chased from reddit and twitter?
What probably isnt welcome is questioning people’s right to exist, right to live unmolested because of someone else’s beliefs (and real molested, not "i saw a minority existed), and the right to make your own medical choices for yourself and your kids. Considering means testing has been proven a waste and the right opposes taxing fair share, i wouldn’t even argue that actual financial conservation is even a point the party makes.
So it’s really hard to see what need this space has for those talking points. Unless it’s actually about being open to real discussion, which frankly facts aren’t often on the side of the right, what good to this community do these ideas offer?
What should be asked is what place does the Right/Conservative philosophy as a whole have in the Lemmy ethos? Is it in and of itself could be argued to be an antithesis to the whole structure and philosophy. Can authoritarian ideals thrive where they cannot take power?
Tumblr i the only other real leftist space I think. You could maybe put baseline social media is somewhat leftist, tik tok, instagram, snapchat, most of those have a leftist lean, primarily because they trend younger. Your general use social media is going to have a left/right lean based on age demographics. That’s just the lean those general social medias are going to have.
Oh yeah tumblr. They pride themselves on being extreme i think in some of the spheres, where as i think nost people in this space are sharing deeply held beliefs. Most of the extreme stuff i see from there seems to be teens/outrage bait.
I forget the ages but i think beehaw/lemmy skews a tad older?
It basically has to skew older, probably 25 to 30+ The vast majority of those younger are going to be on tiktok, sc, insta, or something like discord. Lemmy will be considered more “left” overall than even reddit was. There will be of course bad instances, but i think pressure to defederate from them overall will be strong, especially when the “free speech” instances start having difficult legal questions thrown at them when their users inevitably start saying the quiet part out loud.
God i hate discords and what they have done with gaming documentation. I am completely turned off by any indie dev who requires you join their discord.
But im here, clearly i like forums. The fact that discord is basically backwards adding in forums with their threads thing is proof forums are still useful!
There’s probably a sizable group of younger individuals, talking like 14-18 that are your kinda weird kids who don’t have strong interpersonal social groups and instead compensate with the internet. The ones who find community in various instances are going to probably trend heavily left over time as they’re exposed, inadvertently, to things they wouldn’t normally be if they had more socionormative relationships.
No well adjusted 16 year old with a gaggle of friends is hanging out on sunday night in the summer on lemmy unless they have a very atypical social circle, autism, or both. And I don’t say autism in a derogatory way.
I was that kid back in 2004-2005 who had no social friend group and found connection with people through 4chan when I was 14. The exact same type of people who were attracted to chans way back when are the type of people that are going to be attracted to lemmy and federation. The only difference is this time the chans are already cemented and those who fall into the alt-right pipeline already have their destination mapped out for them. Those that aren’t sucked into the hateful rhetoric will likely find there way here as content seeps into the rest of the internet by osmosis.
Discord is extremely popular among well adjusted teen groups and social outcasts in equal order, it has strongly become “the third location” fpr a lot of people. Instead of hanging out at a skate park, or the mall, or in AIM chats, they’re hanging out in VC on Discord.
My experience hasnt been like yours at all and i am sorry you think you’re weird or something?
I mean i was a loner because geographically a lot of kids didn’t live near me. I took the time to learn about people and everyone who works with me likes me, but i also kept myself safe and i enjoy being weird.
My experience with discord is it’s a place like highschool where people get shut out if they arent as loud.
Im not sure why you’re anti thoughtful young people, i think people enjoy a lot of different activities and informing yourself of the world around you is exactly what makes well adjusted people, not late jight drunken hang outs.
It’s been weird. Have a good one and work on thinking better about tech and those hobbies. No one “well adjusted” really throws that stuff away as inherently maladaptive. I think in person peer pressure not to grow because you live around ignorant people wont have a lot of appeal to a good person.
I wasn’t meaning to imply it was maladaptive, just that the social norm is not for a 16 year old to get involved in something like this unless they’re already a bit divergent from the norm. Teenagers tend to do things their friends are doing, they congregate together, if they’re spending a lot of time in something like Lemmy it most likely means they don’t have strong social circles, because typical teenagers in the U.S. are on tiktok, instagram, and snapchat, and we only have like 60-70k lemmy users. Teenagers naturally gravitate towards the clique/niche that their peers use, and the evidence is overwhelming that teenagers are using tiktok, instagram, and snapchat more than any other social media and it’s not even close. Any teenagers currently using Lemmy are very likely to be LGBT, on the far left pipeline, or young tech enthusiasts, where their peers either don’t share their same interest, they don’t have strong social circles, or they’re in mostly rural areas.
Your average 4chan user back in the mid 2000s was a teenager in a rural town/suburb without any friends, not people in a major city where they had easy access to entertainment and social groups.