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 think a lot of the other posts covered my thoughts on the issue but I wanted to add something less about politics and more about lemmy itself:
There is no one Lemmy, it’s a bunch of federated instances. You made this post on the beehaw instance. Some instances will have their own personality and rules, but if you don’t like them, the beauty of the lemmy and the fediverse is that you can just create another instance. I haven’t done a ton of searching yet, but I imagine that conservatives and right-wing personalities will carve out their own corner eventually.
They have, and most of those instances have been defederated from the rest of the fediverse because they breed a bunch of toxicity and hatred that spills into other instances if you don’t defederate from them. I don’t know of any conservative spaces that haven’t been defederated from most others tbh. I think sh.itjust.works still federates with a lot of them though, at least last I heard.
They’re having a vote on it right now. It’s been a month since the community at large asked for defederation, and will be friday at the earliest before they defederate. In that timeframe, users of sh.itjust.works have skewed farther and farther right and gotten more and more toxic (@natori@beehaw.org can help discuss this as they originated from sh.itjust.works before moving here), and whereas sh.itjust.works started as the instance I felt more confident about refederating with someday, lemmy.world has done more to crack down on the kinds of behavior that got their instance defederated in the first place. It seems that @ruud@lemmy.world has a similar philosophy to what we do over here, but wants more permissive signups under the belief that streamlined community joins will grow the community more organically than checking beforehand that users will follow the rules of the road.
Oh that’s good to know. I saw lemmy.world take some great steps forward like defederating from that one instance (that I won’t list here so it doesn’t drive more traffic to it) so it’s great to hear they’re taking it seriously.
I think that philosophy has some merit, but I’m not sure I want to be a part of that front line instance so to speak haha
But I think Ruud is right, in that there has to be some sort of general instance like that so people can hop in, try things out and dive deeper into other instances if it catches their fancy. I’m honestly just really looking forward to when the mod tools get more robust so that defederation only has to be used as a last resort. It’s not an ideal solution, but the fact that we have that solution is step up from centralized platforms (imo at least).
Agreed 100% fully all the way down. I like it here better, but there is something to be said for a slightly more permissive approach, and I mean SLIGHT
Can confirm. Sh.itjust.works has gone to shit and several of the responses I’ve received - and the areas where they (the admins and moderators that is) have remained conspicuously unresponsive - indicate to me that they are, by and large, quite sympathetic to alt-right views, hence their very slow delay. I get the impression that they come at this from an Enlightened Centrist angle, so I don’t think they consider themselves sympathetic. it’s that kind of sympathy where they think it’s fair to equally tolerate group A that just wants to exist and group B that openly calls for violence against group A. Both sides amirite?
I don’t really want to get down to it too much more than that.
I’m still learning about fediverse so I was a little ignorant when I wrote that part. There will still be a general community and a large chunk of Lemmy will choose 1 side. Whether that be left or right is what we will see in the future. It’s pretty much certain a large chunk of Lemmy will lean 1 way or the other. Same as other websites, federated or not.