Yet.
There’s also the fact that there isn’t an algorithm trying to keep you doomscrolling by promoting commercial content.
I think this is a huge part of it. Occasionally I’ll surf Facebook after checking out the marketplace. Last night I saw tons of posts about that “Try that in a small town” song with tons of people claiming to support it. Just post after post of people saying they don’t see anything racist about it at all, and not a single one pointing out how showing videos of the BLM protests while singing “we take care of our own, try that in a small town” miiiiiiiight just be a little bit racist. Fortunately I usually only click on cat videos and the rare left leaning recommended posts, so I got to see one post with a picture of John Cougar Mellencamp saying something like “I sang about my small town without mentioning violence.” The post had hundreds of comments…all deleted by admins.
Even when you try to avoid the controversy and hateful comments, the system is still designed to keep you doomscrolling. Positivity doesn’t help that…
I need eye bleach - I googled that song and wished I didn’t. You don’t even need to go to a small town - you go 5 feet outside of ANY city in US and everyone suddenly has a Southern accent and half of the people have Confederate flags. My 5 year old was with her mom in a peaceful protest and the fucking sheriff teargassed the group - she didn’t get hit by the teargas but she did almost get crushed by the panicking crowd. Fuck these people. Sorry about the “negativity.” But fuck.
This is underrated. I actually close Lemmy a lot easier and more quickly than I did reddit, it’s not hooking me with dopamine hits nearly as strongly.
As a result, since I know I’ll probably just scroll for a few minutes at a time, I’m more willing to check in more often and toss a few upvotes and maybe a comment or two around.
Yep this is huge. I still scroll on RiF sometimes without being logged in, and I had only ever looked at the subs I was subscribed to until now. I’m shocked by how much infuriating nonsense is being pushed by the site.
Lemmy is so far left leaning because a large part of its existence is due to people being mad at capitalism
And its so tiring to hear about all the time
Edit: and I don’t disagree
I agree with it, but I also agree with you
“I disagree with the bad thing, but I wish the people affected by the bad thing wouldn’t complain about it so much!”
I’m real tired of hearing about Lemmy and Reddit. I just want the other content that I used to consume here. I’m getting pretty tired of hearing how bad Reddit is doing.
It’s like someone coming out of an abusive relationship. Every other sentence is about the awful things they did, how good it is to be away, and did you hear about xyz thing they did.
It’s exhausting.
Capitalism doesn’t tire!
Removed by mod
developed by socialists
I thought only capitalism drives innovation?
Strangely enough, many people do things for other reasons than money. :)
👀 eyeballs the Entire Free / Open source software culture
Name 3.
Altruism, personal fulfillment, drugs
Name 845.
Well, let’s subdivide drugs then and start with the table of contents of PIHKAL and TIHKAL.
it does, in the fields of exploitation sciences, also known as orthodox micro economics
Freedom and personal liberty drives innovation more than anything else.
Capitalism drives dependance tho. Not a socialist but capitalism is terrible as well. Lemmy is created by free software and open source software enthusiasts. This means that code is public, its for everyone, and anyone can use it woth or without modification.
Some people think this is communism
Capitalism drives dependance tho.
So much this. Capitalism does not provide innovative solutions. Capitalism is the idea that there is only one, universal solution to any problem: throw money at it. The fundamental objective of capitalism is to invent new and innovative problems to fit that universal solution.
One of the devs has a guide on how to get into communism and which books to read on their GitHub. People think lemmy is communistic because the devs are.
One of the devs
People have very different opinions. The free software dev communities consist of many weird people as well. Many autistic ones, having other mental issues, and some sane people. But in the end all that matters is the software that they create. They are open and visible. Thoose people can’t be corrupt like the proprietary corporations(facebook, google, reddit) as the anyone can see what the software exactly does. If the software does the job without tracking or doing malicious attempts on you like facebook or google, then its really good
I mean the lead dev. Dessaline
community property is a feature of socialism.
Community property is also a feature of capitalism (the form of it in the USA).
Police stations, public parks, classified documents, national/state parks and conservation areas are examples.
I think ‘community property’ is a byproduct of having a functional community.
Nah those are socialist features within capitalism and are all under assault from the neolib privateers.
more like a prerequisite
A robust and non-ideological non-profit sector is key to any form of healthy capitalist system. That should be an agreeable statement to anyone regardless of if they like or hate capitalism.
There are two main reasons that evangelicals oppose government social services. One: Communism bad (well, “socialism bad” now because they have to poison the well against European democracies now that USSR is gone). Two: If the government helps people, people will be less likely to seek help from evangelical organizations, which eliminates a huge way to market Supply Side Jesus to people. Eating in to evangelicals’ ability to proselytize compellingly is therefore a non-starter.
more like we wanted out of the colonial capitalist echo chamber so we could hear ourselves think.
nice try though
It can be both. You cannot argue that Lemmy is devoid of echo chambers.
You know people can have strong ideals and still have the humanity to help people who may disagree with them? Not everything is run by political ideology.
That’s not how it started, Lemmy started way back from r/redditalternatives with Ellen Pao fiasco.
Thinking like this is why people get surprised when right leaning parties get voted for in elections
Lol right? “Right wing politics only seem popular because of bots”. No, left wing politics only seem popular on social media because old people dont use it, despite making up the majority of many populations, and often times are the only people who actually vote in elections.
Left wing politics are more popular in the real world than they are in real world governments. The thing is that extremely online youth have absolutely no idea of just how far left they are.
Not really. I mean that “because…” part.
Leftism is inherenty tied to technology, especially new. It’s part of its lifestyle. EVERY new, massive social “site” (or online service) is expected to be left-leaning by default. It may later change its political viewpoint, but in its relative infancy it’s left.
Rightism is more about actions taking place in real-world. As such, the technology isn’t perceived as more than a tool, used for specific purpose only, rather than part of, or the foundation of a lifestyle.
…and of course there’s a plethora of alternative political views, options and convictions that are a mix of either extremes of the spectrum - if you meet a person online, it shouldn’t be surprisied to learn about “pro-life”, but also “anti-Trump” and similarly puzzling approaches to various aspects of life.
tl;dr: it’s not about bots. It’s because Lemmy/Mastodon isn’t popular enough to serve as a tool for right-wing politics.
Leftism is inherenty tied to technology, especially new.
I don’t know, there has always been a huge libertarian contingent of the tech industry as well. I’m not sure which is bigger. I hope the leftism.
Yeah crypto bros aren’t exactly leftist, neither is the hypercapitalist Silicon Valley crowd, and I’ve encountered plenty of other tech enthusiasts with worrying opinions.
I feel that comment is on the vibe of “liberals are leftists”.
Edit: “that comment” as in the one above the one I’m replying to…
Libertarians are not leftists.
Ayn Rand style, “Don’t tread on me” objectivists, no. But they just co-opted the term. Libertarianism is pretty much anarchism, which is incomoatible with right wing beliefs, no matter what an-caps try and tell you. A right wing social order necessitates hierarchy, which anarchism is diametrically opposed to.
Libertarians promote “natural” hierarchy; the ones based on slavery, inheritance, and other mechanisms of white supremacy. And ultimately, the hierarchy of money which translates to power. To say they don’t believe in hierarchy when they’re the party of the robber baron who believe the bosses have the right to murder striking workers, even child workers, is frankly silly.
It’s not on anarchist ideology really because of this and only appeals to disinfranchised people if they haven’t bothered to do the math.
It’s like you only read two words of my comment. The dickhead rightoidswho call themselves libertarian are NOT libertarian. It is a left wing ideology. You cannot have a society that is both right wing and libertarian. It is impossible.
That is exactly why those fuckheads bring in bullshit like “natural hierarchy”, to jam their square beliefs into the round hole that is a classless ideology.
They took a word that already had a meaning, and tried to invert it.
Yes, it is beyond bonkers to suggest that crypto fascists want to flatten hierarchies. That is why it’s maddeningly stupid for them to call themselves libertarians. Agreeing with them and calling them libertarians is just feeding their lie.
My point was that anarchism is not compatible with capitalism because capital is a form of hierarchy.
And I read your post. Yes, tea party libertarians ultimately lean more big government authoritarian than strict libertarians should.
But libertarians, even ones that aren’t in bed with the GOP, aren’t anarchist because they ultimately use the power of money and privilege to create hierarchy and control others. They just don’t want democracy (i.e. governments) interfering in that power.
That’s not anarchy but feudalism.
While yes, libertarian is originally a leftist term, that’s not what I meant.
I meant the first comment saying most people on new tech are leftists is wrong. Most people who are technophilic are liberals. As in US style Democrat liberals. Which are NOT leftists. At all.
Why on earth would you say most tech heads are liberal?
Why would you say they aren’t ? They all buy in hard into capitalism.
Where are all these leftist techies?
Depends on which libertarian ideology is being expressed. Left libertarians - anarcho-syndicalists libertarian socialists, anarcho-communists are all libertarians. The right wing of anarchism aren’t leftists, the left wing are.
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Communism and libertarianism have nothing to do with each other. What are you even talking about?
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I’d say I’m generally conservative and have been dabbling in alternative social media for a number of years. Some of the biggest Mastodon instances are/were right leaning. Gab.ai started off as a proprietary site and then migrated to Mastodon. Truth.social was always based on Mastodon. I’ve never been active on them because I don’t like echo chambers though. I’ve never really had a desire to have my thoughts reaffirmed by strangers…
I would assume they’re presence isn’t felt in the fediverse because the concept of de-federating is working? Gab is likely cut off by others and truth social never federated with others to begin with. I don’t think Truth ever intended to though, and really just wanted something they didn’t have to build from scratch.
The only Mastodon instance I actually have an account with now is somewhat right leaning but it’s not their emphasis. Even then I’m not too active on it.
From what I gather, Mastodon attracts little attention in conservative circles.
One of main reasons I’ve heard is that “there’s hardly anyone to talk with”. Beats me if it’s default, general conservative opinion…
Thanks to Big tech censorship, there are lots of people who are more anti-establishment right on the fediverse. Lots of fairly large instances. Some of them are real nasty pieces of work filled with folks dropping n bombs and swastikas, some of them are filled with some of the sweetest religious right folks you ever met in your life.
I think one of the biggest differences is that you don’t have the Jerry Springer algorithm trying to match up a bunch of black people with a bunch of KKK members. Most far right instances don’t defederate anyone, but many of the far left instances defederate the moment anyone looks at them funny so despite sharing a platform, typically there just isn’t that much engagement between the two groups. In the middle of there are instances that are more than happy to federate with both as long as they aren’t too big of jerks.
Did you come up with “Jerry Springer algorithm” expression? Very apt way to express it.
After realizing that it would put a bunch of black guys and a bunch of KKK members in the same space intentionally because it drives overall engagement, it became clear that’s what it was. haha
Yet despite the clear creation of echo chambers, which I think is inevitable given how freedom of association works so smoothly and easily online, the Fediverse forces them all to “live next to each other”.
It’s not an entirely separate service I need to go on if I want to see what all the Nazi kids are up to these days.
This forced adjacency and inability to create any blocks stronger than defederation (which is pretty weak, really, compared to what other services can do) is going to have overall beneficial effects in the long-run, I think. Though it’ll certainly cause its fair share of headaches too.
I’m actually happy to see the reduction in echo chambers for myself because it does 2 things:
- It reminds me that the people I think I disagree with have good points I need to remember, and
- It reminds me that the people I think I agree with have terrible points I need to remember.
For someone who thinks for themselves, seeing extremism in some cases actually makes you less extreme because you see it and realize you don’t agree with it at all.
I mean, they’re there to talk to… If you like jacking each other off… I don’t.
Both of those sites have been ostracized (defederated) from the mastodon fediverse. The mastodon fediverse is in general quite left.
Yes, I said that. Well technically I said Gab was. Truth was so forked I don’t believe there was even an option to defederate them. They intended on a walled garden on their own.
Agree with this ,RW is having an elongasm on twitter while most of my lefties moved to mastodon
I dont think that is the case. Left leaning people are just much less accepting of authority, so there are more likely to move of of reddit. right leaning people also tend to be more conservative, so they are more likely to stay on there old platforms.
There have been many right-wing exodus from reddit over the years. All of them have centered around a perceived “free speech” issue, and they have always flocked to the most promising alternatives (e.g. Voat). Obviously Lemmy with its origins was never seen as particularly appealing for that crowd. This time the issue just happened to touch the left-leaning part more.
Come on I don’t think so. Lemmy was a left leaning platform since the beginning.
I think it’s a different political dimension entirely isn’t it? You have left vs right economics, and then authoritarian vs libertarian governance. I don’t buy into that stupid political compass, but the axes do seem accurate.
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No, it’s just a matter of who they accept as legitimate “authority”.
If the Dumbass-in-Chief, their ministers, and their news had all told them to wear masks, they absolutely would have, but every single one of their primary authority sources were pulling in different directions and they don’t accept any “liberal” sources as legitimate authority. You can see it at a much smaller scale by looking at Church congregation sizes where some ministries focused on trying to protect their elderly and infirm members and those who didn’t.
Conservatives who had pastors who told them to wear masks were a LOT more likely to do so than ones who were getting mixed messaging.
I didn’t follow mask mandates because I was required to or told to by any authority. I did it because it was the right thing to do based on the science, and still is (which is why I still mask up in enclosed or busy spaces).
If we’re talking about acceptance of authority, right leaning folks are less likely to do so
Right-wingers love authority, especially if it’s the kind they approve of. It’s literally part of the ideology. A lot of them didn’t wear masks because the right-wing grifters (like Tucker) told them not too.
Wearing masks during the pandemic was just smart, common sense and had nothing to do with authority, in spite of the right-wingers trying to make it seem like it was.
Grandpa also doesn’t understand federation
Grandpa actually votes tho
As a grandfather, boomer, white cis male, I suggest you might just be over-generalizing.
“as a black man”
Lemmy is a decentralized protocol not a centralized americanized political leaning social media.
Do you think that’s relevant? I don’t see anything about either reddit or lemmy that makes it harder for right-wingers to join. I can tell you that America does not have a monopoly on the alt-right (AfD, Brexit, etc)
I’m keen to learn more if you’ve seen evidence in this topic. I wouldn’t know how to investigate, tbh.
If the platform owners are driving discussions by manipulating feeds (Facebook) or running bots to make the platform look popular (Reddit), the right-wing presence on those platforms might not be as real as we believe.
Well, looking at elections worldwide, the far-right isn’t as small as any extremist party should be…
On Reddit is way harder now (like I care), it is not about monopoly but a state controlled company that’s has censorship from a party.
state controlled company
Umm. Do you mean Tencent? They have a minority holding. The idea that China actively controls reddit is hard to reconcile with the amount of content that is critical of China. Or let me know what you mean, if not that.
has censorship from a party
What censorship, what party? Do you mean t_d being shut down? Because a better explanation of that would be that the majority of civilised people finally had enough of the nasty chumps in that hole, and good riddance to them. Or let me know what you mean, if not that.
State controlled and censored I mean three letter agency, as the NSA leaks.
The political discourse seems toned down here, I am already happy with that.
It doesn’t to me. It’s just communists vs liberals rather than left vs right.
It’s more easily avoided.
But I am seeing 2010 style cringe new atheism though. It’s never a good sign when those people are around, they were the precursors to the cancer we see on the big platforms today.
But that’s just as easily avoided too. I only know what you’re talking about because I saw like 4 cringe atheist memes while broswing All once. I don’t subscribe to any of those pages and so I rarely see it, just like how one could easily avoid political discussion.
When I say easily avoided I mean that I literally don’t see them very often. Whereas new atheism seems to be seeping into the feed wierdly often.
This reminds of when people go to toxic subs on the old place, to shit on fat people or something. The end result of these low iq hateful subs is that you grow a base of angry, preaching anti intellectuals who think they’re right and who are ripe for a right wıng bot army and bad actors to brainwash them, and ultimately afflict cancer on the space.
That said, I am on all too often.
Yes, I prefer my online culture to be entirely Christian, or failing that, trauma-free ex-Christians that have no desire to talk about how fucked the US is because of evangelicalism. High five, buddy.
There are countries other then the US.
Yup. There are. And if they have governments that are dominated by religious activists, the same message applies.
New atheism cringe is different to being pro abortion, women’s autonomy, and advancing marginalised people’s rights. Completely different.
If you specifically identify with new atheism and the thinking of Dawkins and his brigade, I’d seriously reconsider.
Here’s where I’m at - at the local level, the US is already a de facto theocracy in many places. If you have the privilege of being unexposed to this, great. The issue I have with Dawkins is that he’s an asshole that got called out for being an asshole by his own admirers and he doubled down on being an asshole to his own popular detriment. I have no issue with loud pissed-off atheists in a rabidly conservative USA. If the issue is that old school atheists kept their mouths shut, while new atheists are out and proud, you and I are not going to see eye to eye.
If the issue is that old school atheists kept their mouths shut, while new atheists are out and proud, you and I are not going to see eye to eye.
If you think ‘new’ means modern, as in present day, then you’ve been arguing with me for hours for no reason. Because ‘new atheism’ refers to a specific movement, around the 2010s. It’s not simply ‘atheism’ now.
I don’t care about shouty atheists or quiet atheists, it literally doesn’t matter to me. I am wary of people congregating around easy targets like broadly religious people, when religious people can mean anybody. It can be a white supremacist American, or it could be a Yemeni Muslim getting genocided by Saudis using American and UK bombs. And I don’t see that very important distinction made when those low iq anti-theist posts are spammed on c/all.
I would say less “left leaning” and more anti-capitalist / anti fascist. More socialism less Nazis.
At least it’s an ethos.
You’re not wrong, you’re just an asshole. /s
Shut the fuck up Donny!
Not by bots but by rage farming algorithms. Rage farming the right is easy and profitable. Facebook has gotten that down to science. The fake absolutist free speech espoused by Twitter’s management as well as the apparent moderation inaction by Facebook are all about that. Letting right wing nuts rage freely generates engagement, generates ad revenue. The only thing the platforms actively manage is making sure that big name ads don’t show up on Nazi posts.
Among people in general who actually read comments, the left does have a distinct advantage.
If Republicans could read, they’d be real mad
Lemmy also isn’t profit driven, so you don’t get libertarian tech bros.
For all we know the people that are on the right have gone to other platforms. That doesnt stop you jerks from saying im on the right even though im not. For some reason both sides have adopted a “with us or against us” mentality and everyone is a nazi.
That’s exactly what a Nazi would say!
/s
People throw around the word too much, there are actual Nazis around and we need to reserve the term just for their special brand of evil. Otherwise the phrase gets so watered down as to essentially become meaningless.
Otherwise they are just rightwing dipshits.
The rightwing dipshits are now mostly nazis though, the moderate and neutral have been mostly boiled off.
I can only base this on my own government but I’d say about only a small fraction of the right wing party are full on Nazi’s, the rest are just awful people but they’re not evil. Although it is hard to tell because quite a lot in the greedy, which from a distance can’t look the same.
I want to upvote you for your rational take on nazis but downvote you for calling so many people awful.
Watering down language is part of the right wing platform. I think they actually want to be seen as nazis so the term is less powerful. On the other side, they are calling everyone groomers to water down that language as well.
I’ve had people in this thread say that I advocate for genocide.
I don’t think the right are the ones watering down the language
Maybe you should do more research instead of advocating for then.
I know what the word ‘genocide’ means. The left just misuses words all the time.
I don’t need to ‘do more research’
You definitely could do more research since you disagree with scientific consensus on trans issues and think you know better how it aught to be.
I didn’t see anyone accuse you of genocide but from your other comments I wouldn’t be surprised if you did and just didn’t know it or tried to pretend you didn’t because of a technicality.
Sorry, this is the case on both sides. I’m a leftist, and I see it happen from my side all the time. Deflecting and claiming only Republicans do it is ignorant or blatant gaslighting.
I’m called a nazi sometimes from people in my own party. It 100% happens.
Hell, “gaslighting” itself is a good example of this phenomenon, and it’s mostly on the left.
You know your political views are truly independent when both the left and right accuse you of siding with the enemy.
Independent… you mean a dirty centrist?!?
The hate for anyone who weighs ideas no matter which team they’re from is very transparent.
I’m all for saying both sides are bad, because they are, but I’m guessing you either did something to warrant being called a nazi or found a cringey liberal to argue with.
You are absolutely correct. Not all fascist are Nazis.
Conservative =/= fascist
Change my mind
There was already a right wing exodus from Reddit. /r/RedditAlternatives was created during that exodus, which is why their pinned list of alternatives includes things like gab(racists) and ovar.it(terfs).
Don’t forget the classic, “You sure with insert political extremist group on an issue. At least my side doesn’t team up with them.”
Most commonly seen when talking about Nazis obviously. I’ve been criticized for supporting free speech on social media sites because obviously only Nazis would benefit from being able to voice their opinions without worrying about being deplatformed.
Exactly. Blame/credit (blame in this case) doesn’t travel that way.
Take the following example: Alice and Bob both support view X. Bob also supports view Y. Y is evil. Then, Bob can be deemed responsible for supporting view Y. But X does not become evil because Bob is. And so Alice is completely fine.
The right has moved onto other platforms.
A lot of people on the right who would post online have been banned from most of the left leaning platforms and have found their own places to talk.
And the end result is that every site is an echo chamber.
The state of the internet in 2023 is more or less, “Do you want the left-wing circlejerk or the right-wing circlejerk?” And if you want a place where people are allowed to express their views even if it disagrees with the majority opinion of the site, that no longer exists.
I’m sure it must be great if you identify as left or right, but it sure as hell sucks shit if you don’t align completely with either side.
I agree so much.
I love discussing things with people who think differently than I do, that’s how we learn. We should be able to disagree in a civil way and exchange ideas and understand each other and eventually agree to disagree.
But we can’t.
Online it’s either one extreme or the other.
When is someone going to have the balls to create a place where people can argue and talk shit out? Or is that just too mature for the kids online these days who cannot handle a disagreement?
Maybe there should be online discussions that are age restricted. No teenagers, 30+ adults only. I wonder if that would be better or worse
Aren’t you doing that right now?
I mean I always try, because I believe in it.
I think I’ve probably lost 40% of my total upvotes having this conversation though. On reddit when you go too deep into negative karma you need to make a new account because you can’t post in a lot of communities at that point
I think you’re speaking with people willing to engage and you’re not seeing it. Downvotes don’t mean people aren’t discussing, it means they don’t agree or they think you’re coming from a trolling place.
No no, I don’t mean anyone specifically in this conversation
I was more speaking in general.
The end result is that some sites have a lot of white nationalists and some sites have very little white nationalists.
Conservatives have nothing humane to bring to the table at this point, even if not proudly saddled with your average ethonostate enjoyers, the platform is nothing but a fight against progress during a time where crisis requires it.
I always find it funny (albeit in a depressing way) when people on the left act like anything short of totally open borders is white supremacy.
Wanna talk about ethnostates? Check out the demographics and immigration policies for countries like Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Iceland. Wanna talk about racism? Ask the average naturalized immigrant how they feel about illegal immigration.
Supporting more secured borders isn’t racist. The reality is that the American government should prioritize the interests of its own citizens before prioritizing the interests of people from other countries. It drives me up the walls to see how much support our government provides to refugees when meanwhile our own cities are struggling, most often in predominately black areas. Yes it’s a slight false dichotomy to act like we can’t support refugees while also improving our inner cities, but the reality is that we usually fail to do both as they’re often competing interests.
Is it really “supporting a white ethnostate” to say I’d rather have our country let in more immigrants with college degrees or at least a willingness to work over a bunch of people who have zero desire to integrate or even work.
“Progress” doesn’t mean trying to increase the population of our cities and diversity as much as possible even if it means bringing in millions of people who will rely on the government to survive, refuse to integrate into American society, and are the literal opposite of progressive. “Progress” means working to improve the lives of the people we have already living here, regardless of their ethnic background. And currently our immigration policy isn’t accomplishing that.
How many democrats with meaningful power are actually proponents of an “open border”?
The main times I see the term “open borders” is a bunch of republican sites making strawman arguments. Fact is the border isn’t open and nobody serious really wants it open, but if it’s implied enough then people believe it. The #2 hit on google is an official republican senate website attacking this “open border” policy.
https://www.rpc.senate.gov/policy-papers/democrats-declare-mission-accomplished-on-the-open-border
Why this fixation on highlighting immigration in a facetious way to misrepresent the situation? Even the tone-deaf can hear that faint whistle.
Which site has the least strawmen?
I know I shouldn’t go into comment sections of these kind of posts, but man is this depressing.
I know I shouldn’t go into comment sections of these kind of posts, but man is this depressing.
It really is. So many vapid little monsters. You get to witness the ignorance and hatred spewed from people who think they’re moral beacons for the rest of us. It would be funny if it wasn’t so depressing, like you said.
There is also the fact that this isn’t a platform as much as it’s a framework that uses and open protocol. Right leaning people can setup Mastodon, Lemmy, Friendica, and so forth as easily as left wingers.
The biggest problem in general has been people treating Fediverse setups like traditional ones. Facebook, Twitter, Discord are all run by central companies.
Mastodon, Lemmy, Matrix, have the benifit of being usable as bases for people to setup individual communities for themselves and still have some networking.
For some reason both sides have adopted a “with us or against us”
I hate this. I hate that if you are not 100% aligned to a certain groups policies, you’re pretty much the devil in disguise. A leftist Democrat that supports the 2A? You’re a “hard core racist bigot conservative that needs to home someone you love die in a shooting to see how you like it!”. Those people are insane. It’s not how the majority thinks, but those that do are very outspoken and loud so they have way more visibility.
There are a lot of people (on both sides) that can see how extreme parts of their “side” are and are very self aware of those things. They’ll call out their own side for going too far, being too weird, and saying unfactual things. Those are the people that you can have real conversations with. You won’t agree, you won’t change opinions, but the conversation is generally very informative and you’re not getting pissed off at each other (or you do, but you still show each other a mutual respect).
I cannot stand those with the “with us or against us” mentality. They really need to GTFO. And they absolutely cannot say they are patriots and support America first and everything that goes along with that. Because our country was founded on different principals, people with different viewpoints, and we created ways to allow those various viewpoints to exist together. We WANT to have different viewpoints instead of just allowing one to flourish and grow to an extreme and heavy handed policy. If you support the “Us” part of that, we are ALL with us, even if our views are opposing and we refuse to even meet in the middle.
I cannot stand those with the “with us or against us” mentality. They really need to GTFO.
In other words, if they aren’t with you they are against you?
As someone with similar views, I recently realised that I have the exact same tribalism and aggression, it’s just targeted at people who have that mentality.
I like seeing things forbwhat they really are, so I consider myself a centrist. Both sides hate me they are so brainwashed.
Neither side has all the answers. Both sides have valid points, but these fools choosing a side stop using their brains to think for themselves, and just puppet whatever the rest of their cult is parroting.
Well you just got it all figured out!
I’m waiting for your centrist answers for everything! Please do tell.
“I have no strong feelings one way or the other!”
A centrist positions themselves between two parties.
In other words, they are at the mercy of two parties being wrong in just precisely the right way in order for them to be correct.
This is also the easiest way to manipulate a centrist. Just move on of the goalposts, and the center moves, too.
Centrism is just being able to acknowledge that both parties have flaws. If you can’t find any issues with the party you support, that means that you got your political views from someone else instead of developing them yourself.
People on a left-leaning site don’t wanna hear it, but US Democrats aren’t perfect. Their policy on immigration is not sustainable. A de facto open border policy for refugees and people who cross illegally while people with college degrees can’t even get a work visa is absurd. As a nation we are not obligated to help others when many of our own citizens are struggling. Biden’s student debt relief plan would have caused tuition prices to increase at an even faster rate than before and guaranteed further debt relief executive orders would be required in the future. Plus it set an insane precedent that the president could authorize billions in spending without any congressional oversight. Democrats were frightengly authoritarian during COVID with stuff like vaccine mandates and online censorship. Things were labelled as “misinformation” and later accepted to be the truth… repeatedly, and people simply didn’t care. One day you could get banned from every social media site for saying COVID may have come from a lab, and the next day it was perfectly plausible. That stuff would have been unthinkable prior to 2020 and it’s just apparently normal today.
And then there is the stuff where they’re just hypocritical or simply providing lip service. Biden could remove marijuana’s schedule 1 classification today with an executive order, but he won’t. Instead his administion argued in court that marijuana users cannot be trusted owning firearms and the ATF is right to prohibit them from buying guns. Speaking of guns, Biden also signed an executive order declaring pistol braces to be stocks after years of the ATF saying they weren’t stocks, making millions of gun owners into felons, many who didn’t even know about the reclassification. A piece of plastic that was legal one day is now 10 years in federal prison. Democrats are guilty of putting corporate interests before individual interests, much like republicans. Democrats love to talk about how much they care about the environment and climate change, but would sooner pass a law saying people can’t set their AC below 80 degrees than dare invest money into nuclear power or stop subsidizing fossil fuels.
You don’t have to agree with everything I said here. But if you can’t find anything to criticize about your preferred party, or at least acknowledge that these are valid criticisms even if you disagree with them, you are part of the problem.
“Centrists” gets tons of hate online that’s unwarranted IMO. “Centrism” is just a label people like to put on independent voters because mocking them by acting like their political position can be summed up as “Democrats have some good points, but the Nazis do too” is an easy way to dismiss them, when the reality is that most centrists are voters who get no representation since we have a broken-ass two-party system. Admitting that the two-party system is bad doesn’t benefit you if you support one of those two parties. So here we are.
Now do the Republicans.
Is there really anything to say there that everyone in this comment thread would be surprised by?
Republicans care too much about culture war BS
Republicans are blatantly wrong on the issue of abortion, and it’s actually baffling that they continue to oppose abortion even though it’s going to cost them elections
Environment. Need I say more?
Republicans are guilty of supporting giant corporations and serving corporate interests just as much as democrats. The only reason I don’t say they’re more guilty than Democrats is because companies that I consider to be some of the most monopolistic and controlling are tech and media companies that get much more support from democrats. I consider it a tie until one party either blocks a corporate merger or breaks up a monopoly.
I touched on Democrats being creepily authoritarian regarding speech, but of course Republicans are just as eager to censor when they have the opportunity as well.
I could go on, but these are the glaring issues I can think of that immediately come to mind.
What about Desantis being authoritarian and creating his own militia for Florida, Trump going after Muslims and other non-white people, trump encouraging his base (all republicans) to perform a failed coup? You seem to be watering down some very serious things on the republican side. I’m glad you’re sending your best efforts, but it’s not going to be enough here, at least right now.
He reactivated the Florida State Guard. The samekingd of State Guard utilized by like 22 other states including California and New York. The FSG was created way before DeSantis came to office.
To be honest, it looks like you are biased to the republican side.
You make good points though.
Based on two comments I made do you truly think I’m “biased toward the Republican side” or are you just assuming that because you automatically assume anyone who disagrees with Democrats on certain issues is a Republican sympathizer?
I dont think anyone on the left would say the democrats in the US are perfect, in the UK we hate labour since the leader is defiantly not left leaning and the party has fallen in the past few years
Centrist doesnt always mean fence sitter… could just mean you agree with different points opposite of the eisle. Its almost like this whole political system wasnt intended to have a 2 party system or something…
It wasn’t intended, just a long term effect of First Past the Post voting systems.
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It’s hard because everyone 100% has a different definition for every political party/leaning. I’m proud of you for sticking to being open to consider all points if view.
I’m a leftist, but I love having my views pushed against, and I am open to having my views changed on what I believe and think if I find the argument persuasive enough. It really is a sort of cancer that both sides tend to refuse to even consider they might be wrong on anything.
Keep on doing you, the downvotes don’t mean your outlook politically is wrong or bad.
i think its not just the bots but also that the right want their posts to be seen and want to “present” themself and their “opinions”. And i think for that, lemmy is just not visible enough, yet.
Imagine if Lemmy just totally avoided playground level political debate?
