I’ve been using Lemmy for a while now, and I’ve noticed something that I was hoping to potentially discuss with the community.
As a leftist myself (communist), I generally enjoy the content and discussions on Lemmy.
However, I’ve been wondering if we might be facing an issue with ideological diversity.
From my observations:
- Most Lemmy Instances, news articles, posts, comments, etc. seem to come from a distinctly leftist perspective.
- There appears to be a lack of “centrist”, non-political, or right-wing voices (and I don’t mean extreme MAGA-type views, but rather more moderate conservative positions).
- Discussions often feel like they’re happening within an ideological bubble.
My questions to the community are:
- Have others noticed this trend?
- Do you think Lemmy is at risk of becoming an echo chamber for leftist views, a sort of Truth Social, Parler, Gab, etc., esque platform, but for Leftists?
- Is this a problem we should be concerned about, or is it a natural result of Lemmy’s community-driven nature?
- How might we encourage more diverse political perspectives while still maintaining a respectful and inclusive environment?
- What are the potential benefits and drawbacks of having a more politically diverse user base on Lemmy?
As much as I align with many of the views expressed here, I wonder if we’re missing out on valuable dialogue and perspective by not having a more diverse range of political opinions represented.
I’m genuinely curious to hear your thoughts on this.
Hearing from “both sides” and coming to some compromise/middle ground only works if the following is true:
- Both parties are acting in good faith.
- The viewpoints expressed are close enough that they don’t require a total departure from one’s current viewpoint.
- The disputed topic doesn’t have a obvious or clear correct answer.
The problem is, at least in the US, none of these are true for right wingers and even many “centrists.”
You cannot talk to somebody and try to find common ground if they don’t believe in statistical studies by government agencies, they don’t believe in scientific studies by major universities and research institutions, and don’t care about the rights and protections for minority groups.
The older members of my family are almost all conservatives, MAGA supporters, and fundamentalist Christians.
They genuinely believe that Evolution is a myth and the Earth was created 6000 years ago. They believe that illegal immigrants are invading this country and that Democrats are secretly allowing them to. They don’t believe humans have any effect on climate change. They don’t think Covid was anything more than a common cold that the government used as an excuse to try to control people. They don’t believe in vaccines.
I find Lemmy to be very refreshing. I get news from a diverse collection of Leftists sources. Anarchists, statists, weak socialists like the AOC/Bernie types, government studies, independent guerrilla journalists, Communists, Mutualists, Marxists, etc.
But I have no interest in further “diversifying” by adding right wing “sources.”
Cookies can taste good with many different ingredients, but no cookie tastes good with horse poop.
@Lettuceeatlettuce
I could not agree more.
There are plenty of people on the fediverse that are clearly free and independent thinkers - as in not operating from inside a bubble where they get fed opinions and views from others and them regurgitating those views ad nauseam. On Lemmy, I see a lot of curiosity and a lot of people who were probably censored or effectively buried by downvotes on other platforms, despite their good faith and interesting (and sometimes radical) perspectives.
Discussion flows well, there’s less focus on upvotes/downvotes and there is no karma. There doesn’t seem to be a tradition of dog-piling people who wrong-think according to the group consensus (or whatever neoliberal narrative is prevailing) as there is on Reddit. Moderation is much less heavy-handed and there are no shadowbans/comments that don’t show up for others (but only for yourself). There are significantly less bots and almost zero astroturfed content, as well.
Worry less about the labels, I say. If you want mainstream or conservative opinions, it’s very easy to seek them out - the internet is full of those perspectives. If you’re curious, you could play devil’s advocate and discuss current events or other hot topics from a mainstream perspective and ask others why they think differently to better understand the userbase on the fediverse and how things generally go down here. I’m sure plenty of people would be happy to weigh the pros and cons of different viewpoints and perspectives and entertain a discussion about certain issues in good faith.
Not everybody is filtering everything out from a polarized lens and is focused on being an absolutist or purist with their preferred ideology.
There doesn’t seem to be a tradition of dog-piling people who wrong-think according to the group consensus
I think I’ve been in different threads then, because most posts that aren’t the majority opinion around here gets heavily discouraged by downvotes and/or replies.
I’ll keep an eye out. I have been using this website moderately for nearly a year. I’m sorry your experience has been different - not discounting you.
Go through my comment history and you’ll see that the dog-piling on people with wrong think very much exists
👍
I see that you frequently employ laughing in discussion, that you are pretty confused about different ideologies (such as seeing communism as being inherently authoritarian), and that you are frequently sarcastic and dismissive to others. You consider anybody suggesting change outside of capitalist philosophy as radical and you mock others for blaming capitalism for their problems. I apologize if I’m mischaracterizing you, I quickly skimmed a few pages.
Be respectful, debate in good faith, perhaps stop typing your laughs and other perceivably rude remarks if you don’t want backlash. Or just do you - you are allowed to have gripes with various systems and ideologies and express them and discuss them with others.
Pay less attention to the downvotes. The downvotes don’t hide your comment as on Reddit. There is also no collapsing of comments done by mods. Myself, I’m personally not a fan of the upvote/downvote systems and if I continue using this service I’m likely going to zap the upvotes/downvotes and all vote counters with uBlock Origin (as I don’t participate in voting anyway).
I feel like you picked out those examples while ignoring the ones where i have acted in good faith
I did see those examples and of course I commend you for those and empathize with you. I feel it’s best to just not engage with very polarizing topics, and from my experience, changing people’s minds is very difficult if they are firm in their position and feel very strongly about a topic - even if your arguments are sound. If you think or feel differently than the consensus and feel strongly enough to talk about such subjects, just calmly eat the downvotes in such topics as you did. I promise you’ll be stronger for it.
Listen, I was just trying to explain why some of the downvotes might be happening generally and I’m certainly not attacking you or against you. You’re free to see things however you’d like and hold whatever views you like. Again, if it were my choice votes wouldn’t appear at all.
I just know people are very sensitive to tone, and I understand that it’s difficult to always be on your best behavior when people don’t give you the respect you deserve, but I assure you there’s a balancing act where you can not be a doormat and also assert yourself.
I respect your nuanced takes. I wish there were more on the fediverse with your mindset and calm approach to conversation.
Removed by mod
like bluesky is rightist , lemmy may be leftist . it also depends on the server , left has blocked right and vice versa . try to find a right one
Since when is Bluesky rightist?
Bluesky is very liberal.
Economically rightwing or socially?
Liberalism as an economic ideology. It seems fairly progressive socially.
Ah shit, want to hear my economic hot takes? Haha
Sure, why not
I want to have private schooling preserved
Wait you’re saying that calling people nazis if they have a different viewpoint than you doesn’t foster diversity? Who would have thought.
Seems like lemmy.world already provides plenty of right wing perspectives, we really don’t need me.
.world is modded to be that way… ESP news and politics
Modded, and federated/defederated. They intentionally defed from the Marxist dominated instances because they wanted to erase any real Marxist presence.
“Oh no theyre bRiGaDiNg us!!!11”
Lemmy.ml being extremely broadly federated but removing rule-breaking comments: scary and bad
Lemmy.world defederating Marxist-aligned instances so no one on those instances can ever offer input: wholesome and liberal
I really wish we took some more precautions before the reddit exodus. We saw it coming but I definitely didn’t do anything to plan for it. I guess I’d just not been there for such a long time that I forgot just how bad that userbase had gotten.
Hindsight is 20/20, we know more now than we did then and can better prepare for next time.
I think the problem is in the opposite direction. Society is too ideologically homogeneous in being against socialism. The major narratives are controlled by nation-states and corporations, social media are infested with political advertisement and propaganda.
So, as others say, I believe it is sorta uninformed and middle-of-the-road fallacy to find a corner of the internet where you can speak your mind without being harassed by white supremacist trolls, and say we need more diverse views.
Right wingers have (had) Parlel, Gap, TruthSocial, now they have X, and Facebook, where they were also dominating and harassing in the past. No leftists and/or genderqueer person would survive a day at these platforms.
But Lemmy being primarily/explicitly leftist is the problem, and you suddenly are alarmed for echo chambers. This is not quite fair, now is it.
As for Lemmy per se, I don’t think it is too homogeneous. I debate centrists and liberals every other day. And recent discussions showed that the amount of latent transphobia in the site is shocking, with people knowing next to nothing apart from 4chan/MAGA talking points.
How can this happen after all these years of activism and outreach. It is because of the ecosystem of echo chambers in the broader communications and media landscape. This discourse never reached those people.
Considering it was the position of major medical and professional organizations, it shows that the pathology lies with the existing social media and broader media enterprizes, with a prominently selective messaging.
Do I need to say that this led to widespread science-denialism for which mainstream platforms are clearly to blame?
If your inquiry is honest, then the only explanation is that the propaganda apparatus works so well, that the (relative) absence of the dominating narratives makes you anxious that you entered an echo chamber, when in fact you probably have been in an echo chamber so far.
If your inquiry is honest
They claim to be communist but wants more centrists and rightwingers here. It’s a clear clue they are not honest.
Is it so strange to entertain the thought of talking with people outside your bubble? Not everyone enjoys day after day of single-opinion threads and enjoy having well-intentioned discussions with other people. Political movements would never go anywhere if they never left a basement.
I only know a single other Communist IRL and they’re my fiancé. Existence forces me to grapple with liberalism and fascism on a daily basis, maybe an Anarchist here or there. It is only here that I can talk to comrades.
Bruh, i live in fucking Poland, literally everyone around is shitlib or fascist and any kind of socialist thought is tightly censored in non stop anticommunist onslaught in every possible media, so you can take your plurality posturing and shove it where the sun don’t shine.
go back to Reddit nerd
Yeah, it’s not necessarily bad but it affects my point of view
Some might deny it, some might agree but decide it’s for the best and apparently, others will just denote the least left of the leftists as conservative scum
The thing about the right wing is that it always boils down to the cruelty being the point. People play it up -just- being a difference of opinion like we’re talking about whether or not pineapple is good on pizza; when the opinions in question are that brown people are inferior, trans people people don’t deserve rights, a woman’s life is worth less than a fetus, etc: there’s no valuable dialogue to be had. Ban the fucker and don’t look back.
The closest thing to valuable dialogue you’re going to get with that garbage is the bullshit veneer they slap onto their vitriol to make it easier to sell - the whole white knight bit about protecting babies or bathrooms or some other nonsense that conveniently lands the same outgroups into a bind every single time. If you think any of that shit is in good faith, you’ve fallen for a trap before the conversation even starts.
Diversity of thought is great, up until we start turning to hatred/bigotry for a fresh perspective. Those are not welcome here, nor should they be anywhere else.
I’d say rightwing is inherently egoistic, far right is what you are talking about.
Both are tiresome when it comes to discussions, one is full of hate, the other lacks compassion.
So yes, what is there to discuss? What “viewpoint” is there to see?
Self-care.
Being egoistic or even egocentric isn’t self care.
It is caring about oneself. Exclusively.
Like a banana is a fruit, but fruit isn’t “a banana”.
Sure. Banana is the favourite fruit, and all the others are set aside.
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
There is the same kind of special snowflake attitude on here that ruined Reddit. You people only want to have your exclusive social bubble where you can sniff each other’s farts. I’m not interested in that.
The size of my block list tells me there are plenty of right-wing voices on the platform. No everyone on that list is right-wing, but I’m fairly certain a majority of them are.
Liberals are not leftists.
yeah, liberals are conservative scum lol.
liberals are literally on the left wing of the spectrum, but apparently that’s not good enough for ‘arbitrary decider of who’s a leftist’ here
You have to be at least anti-capitalist to be a leftist. That’s the bare minimum.
Lemmy liberals are centrists. They favor capitalism with regulations and social welfare.
You have to be at least anti-capitalist to be a leftist.
oh I must have missed the “YOU MUST BE AT LEAST THIS ANARCHO-MARXIST TO RIDE THE LEFTIST LABEL” sign at the front of the line.
damn is this really how you think? are these really the thoughts that just bubble up in that grey matter?
way too much time on your hands if so
you’re so fucking busy delineating who’s not a good leftist that the conservatives are going to destroy you all and you’ll be quibbling about who was a real one and who’s faking being in the concentration camp.
No, liberals just aren’t leftists.
But literally, you do need to be anticapitalist to be a leftist.
Where did you learn your stance from? Its wild.
That’s the problem with labels. They often mean different things to different people.
Yeah, there’s the academic record and then there’s random forum posters. Different meanings, sure: with one worth discarding.
This is the result of a century of communist/socialist purges and of cold war propaganda in the US. Most Burgerstanians haven’t known their asses from their elbows politically for generations.
It isn’t a purity test, anticapitalism starts at some form of Socislism.
The liberal wants to preserve some parts of the capitalist tradition while enacting some social reforms. That puts them in the center.
You want to talk about concentration camps? The US has the largest incarcerated population in the world, and it has my entire life, since Clinton introduced the Crime Bill. The prison population almost doubled from 1990 to 2000. That’s liberalism.
Yeah, in the interest of not having a bloody, civil war, I’d rather try to correct the economic paradigm that we have rather than instill a new one that will have its own set of unique and terrible problems (for example, see nomenklatura).
The chaos that will arise from the transition will be deadly, terrifying, and profound. It is not something I wish my children to have to go through. So, yeah…of course I’d rather work to fix the system that we have.
(for example, see nomenklatura)
We have nomencultura at home, in the Professional Managerial Class: the college educated labor aristocracy that serves the capitalist class.
Okay, but that’s why you aren’t a leftist.
Personally, the reason I have an .ml account instead of an account on one of the farther left instances which aren’t federated with .world is because I want to argue with people like you. I welcome the diversity of opinion between leftists and liberals, I deliberately expose myself to it. Liberals keep me sharp without being emotionally exhausting the way people farther to the right are.
These are well established political definitions, not something we just up and decided a few days ago. Political position along a left and right axis, defined in the context of the economic present, with a pro- or anti-capitalist stance on either side. “The Left” has more or less been defined by an anti-capitalism - pro-socialism stance for a long time, despite whatever labels some news outlets choose to use to demonize liberals and Democrats. They restrict definitions to the Overton window, just a sliver of the full political spectrum, which is firmly planted rightward, and promote the idea that the left side of the window is “The Left”. It isn’t. Many iberals and the democratic party are firmly pro-capitalist. It isn’t that they are good or bad leftists, they just aren’t leftists at all. We aren’t too busy figuring this out, we’ve been clear with these definitions for forever.
Liberals support capitalism, ergo they are on the right.
liberals are literally on the left wing of the spectrum
They literally aren’t
Leftists are socialists. Liberals are not socialists, they are liberals. Liberalism is founded on the right to private property, otherwise known as private ownership of the means of production, while socialists call for the abolition of private property (not to be confused with personal property).
Liberals are auth right on the political compass.
Leftism is anti-capitalist.
The Political Compass is generally a terrible way to view politics, I wouldn’t put any stock in it.
It’s an oversimplification and has its limitations but that’s often what’s needed to reach mass appeal and be useful in discourse.
No, the political compass is an oversimplification of political ideologies that is extremely biased towards liberal viewpoints of the world. It is not useful and only actually harms political discussion.
On the contrary, it makes little sense at all. Ideologies can’t be put on a compass like that.
On the contrary, it’s is a useful heuristic, even if it’s not perfect. While ideologies are complex and multifaceted, it provides a framework to map tendencies. It simplifies ideologies, sure- but that’s precisely its value & the social/cultural dimension and is harder to map
When you simplify ideology too much, you ceate more confusion, like elsewhere in the thread when you categorize Marxist means as auth left and ends as lib left, despite Marxism being consistent in means and ends. There are far more issues with it than it solves.
But that’s just it - it’s not a useful heuristic, it’s a delusional framework, even more than the geocentric model was. We were mapping the planets onto that, but that didn’t make it useful.
I find circles around .world to be more liberal and not leftist. (Not that there aren’t any on .world… Just leans that way)
There’s not much in terms of right wing spaces but tbh I’m uh, completely fine with that.
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.
