I can’t really think of a reason for that as Reddit is hated somewhat equally by “both” sides of the spectrum. It’s just something I find interesting.
Not really meaning for this to sound as arrogant as it’s going to, but… Lemmy is almost entirely populated by nerds so far.
Nerds tend to be open to tech, maybe a little smarter overall. You know? You can tell by the grammar, the spelling. It’s a different group here.
Reality is left leaning, and the stupider someone is, in general, the more likely they are to lean right politically. The rest of the right are the really rich, who tend to be up the psychological spectrum toward sociopathic, so of course they would have no time for caring for others’ needs.
Reality is left leaning…
It really is. So much of conservatism involves pissing into the wind, and trying to argue against objective truth.
Reality is left leaning
I know this was a joke Colbert made, but the truth is the reverse: the left is reality-leaning. It’s truly terrifying to see how divorced from reality the right-wing is, and how gleefully they just keep storming in that direction.
To an extent. But whenever there is a political discussion on Hacker News, the lib right response is very, very loud, and I try to remind myself I appreciate Hacker News for its tech news.
I think the culture is just different. Lemmy was started and run by Tankies. Hacker News was started by Y Combinator, which incubates silicon valley startups. They’re going to attract different audiences, or at least different groups of people who will put up with different politics. I can’t claim to be particularly upset about the .ml domains being pulled and the center mass of Lemmy moving away from those instances.
The super rich are usually highly educated but they live in such a homogenous bubble that they’re opinions on the majority of society should be entirely discounted. They usually have a total lack of empathy for people and vote for politicians with the same attitude. I have met some super rich people who try very hard to go against the grain and not fall into that mindset, but something about the need for protecting your money and lifestyle usually promotes an untrustworthy and skeptical view of everyone in their lives including their own family.
Perfectly summed up.
The political vibe on Lemmy isn’t really a new thing. Reddit had it 15 years ago. Good forums and IRC channels had it before that. It’s been part of the “golden age” of every online social medium
Eventually, teenage edgelords find start taking up too much space. Shortly after that, the far-right turn up to prey on them.
The people who made the platform good in the first place leave and the cycle begins anew.
Lemmy is almost entirely populated by nerds so far.
did you want to say “smart people” ? because thats an interesting way to express that
Just cause I’m a nerd dusnt mean I can spell correctly
“tens”
“You can tell by the grammar, the spelling”
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There’s been tons of right-leaning Reddit alternatives before, but they always quickly devolved into Nazi spaces.
Lemmy was the first one that I’m aware of, which told Nazis to fuck off right from the beginning.
progression tends not to be conservative
Lemmy is much less US-centric than Reddit.
I wonder if there are demographics by IP already? TBH most of the threads I’ve been in have felt very US Centric. I also came with the great reddit migration too though.
On my feed, at least, I have my frontpage set to whatever the kbin equivalent to “all” is. I see lots of other languages beyond English populating - particularly German. The Lemmy instance I chose when I initially made my way to the fediverse operates out of China. They’re chill over there.
I dunno. I think if you’re only finding people discussing the US here, then you’ve probably accidentally pigeonholed yourself based on your own interests. The fediverse is diverse.
I mean yeah. Being only English speaking with gringo Spanish doesn’t let me understand memes in German or any of the other various non-english speaking magazines lol.
English is the defacto lingua franca though. Particularly on the web. The diversity I’ve seen still heavily leans English, and western, which makes plenty of sense.
How do you get more languages?
Lemmy was initially created by communists.
It’s still in the process of being created, and the communism is a bit less in your face now alongside there being other contributors to the code, but that’s how it started.
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Are you arguing that Twitter is right wing because it is US-centric, and not because of Musk’s leveraged buyout?
I would argue that US social media platforms are (now) right wing because of aggressive financial attacks meant to break up open social engagement, as this is bad for business and sociopaths looking to exploit people for profit. Reddit was left wing, until it was bought and sold. Same with Twitter.
However my comment was merely rejecting the idea that Lemmy is left wing because it is not US-centric. Lemmy was started by tankies, who say they’re left wing and have some left wing ideologies, but really they’re more authoritarian fascists, and fascism is in fact right wing. However as Lemmy grew it became apparent that this stance would impede its growth - particularly in western markets - so the main devs have tried to minimise their political views and keep the program neutral; now those views are primarily concentrated at lemmygrad.
Lemmy is not US-centric, but that’s not why it’s left wing. Lemmy is left wing because rational empathetic thought is naturally left wing. Lemmy is full of communism because it was started by communists/tankies.
If you think Marxist-leninists are fascists, or like fascists, then you don’t really understand what either of those words mean man.
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The US is not inherently nor totally right wing, and Twitter was predominantly left wing until fairly recently. It might not have been full left wing socialist, but it was certainly left of centre.
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Both parties in the US government are indeed right wing, but not everyone and everything in the US is right wing.
Communism is unfortunately a dirty word in the US, and socialism isn’t far behind it. It doesn’t help that there have been numerous foreign governments that call themselves communist that the US has labeled as enemies and fought against. As a result, an American labeling themselves communist is often ostracised. However, many people do in fact hold those ideals, albeit quietly and/or without naming it such.
An American politics forum is of course going to mirror American politics.
However Twitter and reddit as a whole were left wing. Not as in reading Marx, but in being for the good of everyone, with the core principle of serving the needs of the many rather than the desires of the few. They were also incredibly liberal. They’ve since been taken over by pseudo right wing authoritarian interests, gradually since around 2016.
Most of comments on popular communities boil down to “capitalism bad communism only solution”. Very in your face and everywhere
Yes, and I would say that’s because of lemmy’s communist/tankie roots. Which is a philosophy based in left wing ideology, however in practice it is more authoritarian fascism, which is right wing.
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Is it? Just look at the comments here - the thought is about political left and right and yet almost everybody is talking about conservatives, that’s a sure sign of Americans.
Plus I bet a good portion of the extreme left here are Americans disillusioned with their government, swinging hard into the other extreme.
Thank fuck for that.
Prove it, because I only see US-centric posts while browsing /all.
And no, America is not the US.
Your ALL is amplifying the highest engagement posts from the largest instances, particularly lemmy.world, which is definitely US-centric due to it being the largest open registration instance during the exodus… Go ahead and switch to your instances LOCAL and see what original content is being posted on sopuli.xyz. Quite a difference. https://sopuli.xyz/?dataType=Post&listingType=Local&page=1&sort=Active
The thing is that I don’t have those issues on Lemmy, because I usually browse by /local, both on this server and on beehaw. But I had to block lemmy.world with my user on Kbin due to that problem you were pointing out. And miraculously, I can see content from Kbin, lemmy.ml, blahaj, beehaw sopuli, and so on, because there is no way to browse only local content on Kbin as it can be done on Lemmy.
Nice!
Really? I’ve only seen US related stuff here
How many of your subscribed communities lie outside of lemmy.world? Very possible you’ve pigeonholed yourself. World almost certainly has a heavy US bias as it was the largest instance with open registration during the exodus.
Lemmy is made up of a ton of instances, many of which have quite limited US-related content. Posts from smaller instances may not rise to the top of World but they do elsewhere. Whereas World posts are going to rise across most instances, due to sheer volume. Where the posts come from is not as indicative of diversity as where the comments and votes come from.
Wait there are others apart from world?
Hundreds. Here’s just a few places you can use for discovery.
Reality has a well known left leaning bias.
Conservatives and their politics do not have equal status. In this climate, “both sides” is toxic and suggest each is equally supported and viable. They are not. The right is an incredibly hateful minority end should be treated as such.
This actually makes a lot of sense. A lot of people are using Lemmy either because they prefer federated web platforms to centralized, which makes it antithetical to corporate interests, or because they’re opposed to Reddit’s API policy, which was a blatant move to squeeze more money out of their users. Either way, Lemmy’s appeal is very anti-capitalist, and since opposition to capitalism is a generally left-wing philosophy, I can totally see why most Lemmy users would be left-wing.
"I’ve noticed that lemmy as a whole has much more moral, empathetic individuals than reddit (outside of political servers of course)
21st century politics in a nutshell, lmao
I think you’ll find a lot more leftists interested in platforms that are not powered solely by money and profit. Lemmy, much like Mastodon and other federated platforms, only need instances to run to be usable. It doesn’t require millions of dollars to keep it afloat.
Generally speaking centrist and right wingers, especially in Western countries, tend to be very capitalist. They only understand the value in terms of money.
But I think this is a bit of a biased comment. Many right wingers went on to fringe corners of the internet, Places like voat, 8chan, Trump’s twitter (what’s it called?)… Basically all the places where QAnon festered. They believe that mainstream social media is censoring right-wing ideas. I don’t really see them favor platforms that are “capitalist”.
they were looking for unmoderated corners, not for places not powered by money and profit. Which I find orthogonal to the comment from OP. That there’s some overlap on the end result doesn’t mean OP was biased at all.
You hit the nail on the head there. There are lots of reasons to seek out a less corporate, less mainstream online community. No need to invoke any horseshoe theories.
So far I see very little evidence of QAnon type ratholes here, probably in no small part because the platform doesn’t really seem conducive to paranoid echo chamber type activity.
The extremes are similars in various ways.
Broadly speaking, so-called conservative folk are not creative. They resist change, and trying new things is umm trying new things.
Weirdos like me LOVE CHANGE and novelty so you can probably guess which direction I lean.
Trans and queer and furry and weird folk are often programmers and creative folk. ActivityPub is written largely by and for queer and trans and furry folk. So no surprise it’s so strongly supportive of individual expression and rights.
Is anyone surprised that everything the chump crowd touches fails?
Maybe because on reddit you have an absolute fuck ton of right wing propaganda bots.
Anti-corporate platforms don’t generally appeal to people that built and uphold the existing corporate status quo.
The first wave here were anticapitalists, anarchists or communists. The second wave are the most anti-corporate “liberals”.
Probably because this migration may be related to the anti-corpo sentiment, which is more common in leftist circles
reddit had given into the “work the refs” strategy of the American right wing. That artificially elevated the voices of the right and suppressed the voices of the left. It’s actually the case when you look at surveys and voting behaviors that right wing ideas are abysmally unpopular.
So when we’re on an actually free platform that doesn’t have an “engagement” based algorithm driving anger and division, with no one putting their thumb on the scale (or people who try getting defederated), “leftist” ideas come up.
The confusion reflected in the OP is the obvious outcome of the post Fairness Doctrine “both sides” media landscape. There really aren’t as many right wing people as left wing. We are legion.
Left and right are two stupid categories built up by propaganda, get them out of your head and start to think on your own terms
Lemmy is exactly as left leaning as Reddit was before the wave of propaganda and bots emboldened the right wing crazies to think they were the majority or welcome. I remember the falsely inflated upvotes that made those morons think they were the “silent majority”.
