edit: having a community dedicated to letists only can be a bad idea in that it can make sure your beliefs are not questioned. I have thought myself as a socialist and I have thought myself as a anarcho-capitalist, I don’t believe in either anymore. I think if radical views go unchecked they might cause problems. Although I am a capitalist now, being confronted by socialists has made me aware of capitalisms deep flaws. When I considered myself a communist (17 year old me) I thought opposing views really changed my mind. So that’s the ideologically diversity I am talking about.

I love the outlook of lemmy, I think the design is decent and simplistic. But one thing I can’t seem to get over is the fact that almost everyone here seem to think the same politically. Why do you guys think this is?? I know this is a community of leftists foss enthusiasts but I hope everyone here is aware that it is driving many people away from adapting it.

  • tracyspcy@lemmy.ml
    1·
    3 年前

    Just tell me why lemmy.ml should necessarily be ideologically diverse? To be in permanent chaos and useless fights? I think there is already plenty of such platforms…

    • Jerald@lemmy.mlOP
      0·
      3 年前

      You might be right, I do understand your point. Healthy disagreement is not alive anymore. But I think having a community dedicated to letists only can be a bad idea in that it can make sure your beliefs are not questioned. I have thought myself as a socialist and I have thought myself as a anarcho-capitalist, I don’t believe in either anymore. I think if radical views go unchecked they might cause problems.

      • 🏳️‍🌈 Gay Legend 🏳️‍🌈@lemmy.ml
        11·
        3 年前

        You’re missing an essential part: Marxists are the only ones who can view society in a scientific light. It’s like being frustrated that everyone on a community knows so much about a topic, it doesn’t really make sense to be frustrated about. What, when you say something dumb are people too happy and fast to correct you? If you want to feel smart start interacting with YouTube comments, if you want to learn then maybe understand what the actual diverse viewpoints here understand about the world.

  • Whom@lemmy.ml
    1·
    3 年前

    I’m going to paste my comment from a similar topic:

    I find that conversation flourishes when you limit it to a certain degree. In spaces which are completely open and have a massive range of opinion, what you’ll find is mostly yelling at each other over broad talking points that everyone is already familiar with. After a while, nothing of interest comes out of the far left clashing with the far right all the time. But when you limit it, time can be spent doing other things than yelling at the dickhead on the other side who you have little to no overlap with and see as a dire enemy. You can talk about nuances in principles, differences in organizing, etc. It makes for richer, more interesting conversation.

    There’s also quite a huge range within the umbrella of leftism, and honestly we already have a huge enough gap there that there’s a lot of worthless clashing. Broadening that would only make the site worse.

  • poVoq@lemmy.ml
    1·
    3 年前

    There is https://wolfballs.com/ as a Lemmy instance that is more right-leaning and you are always free to host your own.

    “Centrism” isn’t really a position one can have… what you mean is “in support of the status quo” which is IMHO also right leaning as it is inherently conservative.

    The recent influx of Genzedong users definitely lowered the discussion quality here, but beyond those lemmygrad.ml users there is actually quite some ideological diversity in the Lemmyverse. Maybe consider signing up on an instance that does not federate with lemmygrad.ml 🤷

    • Soviet Snake@lemmygrad.ml
      0·
      3 年前

      I think the anarchist community could be bigger but apart from that, if you block Lemmygrad you get a more or less diverse community in the left leaning spectre, I think what OP meant is they want more liberals.

            • comfy@lemmy.ml
              0·
              3 年前

              It’s hard to balance it, especially with external factors. I think a particular issue is that, in my experience, most of the people seeking ‘free speech’ platforms are those who get banned from other places. And that also plays into the platform audience: I honestly believe you tolerate a very wide range of views on the platform, but the userbase and culture will lead some groups of people to like the community and others to dislike it. Contrast somewhere like gtio.io which (currently) doesn’t have a monoculture of narrow political views, with conversations about pro-communism, racism, age-of-consent and both “left” and “right” libertarianism existing in the same place, but they are not ‘free speech’ site at all: they explicitly enforce civility, for example. You won’t get racists or tankies other exclusionaries spamming mindless insults and slurs to dissuade people who don’t want to be around that, pushing the community in one direction and leading others to find more comfortable spaces. Hatred is a price of free speech, and one that keeps most less extreme people away, and leads the most popular in-group to near-monopolize. A Muslim would probably leave Lemmygrad or Wolfballs pretty quickly, but the de-facto in-groups would feel welcome, regardless of moderation and platform censorship.

              I am curious as to why you say free speech would be better without anonymity: anonymity removes reputational and (significant) social filters that lead to self-censorship or harassment. Anonymous imageboards have been infamous as free speech havens, even the ones with significant censorship. That said, they have added moderation hurdles with commercial spam, illegal content and ban evasion.

    • morrowind@lemmy.ml
      0·
      3 年前

      “Centrism” isn’t really a position one can have… what you mean is “in support of the status quo” which is IMHO also right leaning as it is inherently conservative.

      This is why we need more diversity of thought

            • pingveno@lemmy.ml
              0·
              3 年前

              Being in a bubble is a problem. It’s how you get things like QAnon. It’s also how you get extremely out of touch with the rest of society.

              • southerntofu@lemmy.ml
                0·
                3 年前

                You mean when you have “leftists” doing free-labor propaganda for one of the wealthiest imperialist leaders on Earth (Putin)? :D

                i don’t really like this bubble theory. It’s important to have a comfort zone where you can express yourself freely, and that’s incompatible with a fully open-door policy (no moderation). In the global north, people complaining about filter bubbles are really complaining about people escaping from the majority view, which is a feature not a bug.

                But i agree with you that some places to meet/debate is very good. Nobody was born anarchist or queer, and only through debate and praxis can we evolve to become better versions of ourselves. Hell, i’ve met some right-wingers in my life who were much more left-wing than some communists (i said some)…

                • pingveno@lemmy.ml
                  0·
                  3 年前

                  I would agree that having a comfortable space is healthy, especially for minority opinions. The problem comes when people mostly or entirely stay in an extremist minority space. They become highly separated from the mainstream, but then wonder why their ideas that everyone around them agrees with aren’t being put into practice. We saw this with people who couldn’t believe that Biden won because everyone around them supported Trump.

  • _ed@sopuli.xyz
    0·
    3 年前

    Second follow up - There is a good question here in that you want to engage on the lemmy platform, but did not necessarily land on the right server. I note that if you try to sign up on lemmy.ml it states at the top of the sign up page Before you register on lemmy.ml, please have a look at Joinlemmy to see if there is an instance that better fits your region, language or interests. Did you look at this page or go past and quickly jump on to see what things were about. Did you look at the content posted on lemmy.ml before deciding to join?

  • Ghast@lemmy.ml
    0·
    3 年前

    Sounds like more of a general problem than a Lemmy problem.

    Different instances leaning into different thoughts seems like exactly what you’d want. After alll, the ‘echo chamber’ is really a pejorative name for a community (or at least a necessary aspect of a community).

    I don’t think there are Left or Right wing ideologies - the entire idea’s nonsense, but I’ve not found problems on the instance due to being insufficiently Left wing.

    • comfy@lemmy.ml
      0·
      3 年前

      The left-right spectrum is obsolete, harmful, absolute nonsense, yes. As for problems on the instance over ‘insufficient left wing’, it did have more impacts when instances like Wolfballs federated with here (de-facto ‘right’ American Libertarianism instance) and I have seen bans (mostly from single communities but occasionally global) from a couple of accounts posting repetitively about pro-NATO topics wrt Ukraine in news communities. Overall, it doesn’t seem to be a big issue here but I think that’s partly due to the community not pushing those boundaries much.

      • southerntofu@lemmy.ml
        0·
        3 年前

        Why would you consider yourself anti-communist? If you mean you’re against absolute raw State power ruining our lives (like in the USSR) i very much agree, but communism can exist without coercion and State power. In fact, i would argue there was no Communism under the USSR and communism (stateless, classless society) is still a worthy goal.

          • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.ml
            0·
            3 年前

            This has nothing to do with communism. I’m not aware of any large societies that aren’t organized this way regardless of what political system they subscribe to.

          • poVoq@lemmy.ml
            0·
            3 年前

            There have been many proposals, such as a confederation of communes, but the real question is why would you even want large states? Through out history these inherently imperial states have caused nothing but suffering and war.

            • liwott@nerdica.net
              0·
              3 年前

              why would you even want large states?

              Even if not states, we need some form of large-scale organisation, especially when we are facing global challenges (like climate changing) that require a global response.

              • poVoq@lemmy.ml
                0·
                3 年前

                Looking at the response to climate change so far, I think it is safe to say that the large states have been an active hindrance. Way too much geopolitics standing in the way of coming together and jointly working on the problem.

  • UnkTheUnk
    0·
    3 年前

    I think the problem is that there does need to be a certain amount of anti-establishment to even be interested in a place like Lemmy, there don’t tend to be a lot of anti establishment centrists (those who call themselves as such are for the most party just rightwingers).

    While I do agree that ideological diversity is good, one does need to be careful when trying to enact it because you might end up with a place like r/polititicalcompassmemes (though that particular cesspit is probably a different thing entirely).

    The main issue when it comes to spreading FOSS alternatives to big tech is that how interesting a social media space is is almost directly related to how much activity there is on it, to be frank there really isn’t much going on here. How we get people to show up and adapt it for themselves is that we ourselves be more engaged in it and spread the word elsewhere off-site

  • brazilian@lemmy.ml
    0·
    3 年前

    What should be an approach for this alleged lack of diversity? Lemmy is an open platform where everyone can join, not restricted to any personal characteristic, and assume the identity that best matches them.

    So, IMHO, there is no problem to solve.

  • Gmork@lemmy.ml
    0·
    3 年前

    I understand what you are saying. Echo Chambers are absolutely dangerous.

    People need to be exposed to views that don’t necessarily align with theirs. That way they can expand their viewpoint.

    Having said that, this is just one site among many. Not every website has to hold multiple views. Taking the internet as a whole, there are a variety of websites that people can get differing opinions and viewpoints.

    Now that I think about it, it sounds good in theory but I know many far-right people that don’t attempt to look for alternative sources. They just keep delving down the same Rabbit Hole instead of looking for differing views. So you might be on to something.

    • comfy@lemmy.ml
      0·
      3 年前

      Why should growth be a primary goal in a topic-specific instance?

      Of course growth is necessary for suvival and slow growth (or strong growth with very strong moderation) is healthy for a community, and I personally am able to be civil and tolerant of even extremely divergent ideological beliefs, but why should this place compromise its stated, explicit values just because it’s popular? I don’t see it as an issue at hand if people like this thread creator feel uncomfortable on lemmy.ml, the issue is that they are not aware of other instances (or are just being petty about not being welcome in the largest ones and think the world needs to change for them; I’m not accusing but I do see it a lot).

        • comfy@lemmy.ml
          0·
          3 年前

          There is no compromise to its values with tolerance

          Not inherently, but I would argue that a minority viewpoint tolerating a contradictory mainstream view leaves it open to dilution, compromising its values.

          Take /r/antiwork on reddit. How did it go from being radical anarchists against the concept of work as we know it, into a place where a founding moderator talking about those same beliefs in an interview makes their overwhelming majority feel embarrassed? A rapid rise in tolerated but unaligned newcomers progressively pushed the window of popular values away until the community’s stated values were undeniably compromised by the majority of users.

          I do think that, similar to what you said, a big issue is a misconception that lemmy.ml is somehow the only instance or the official instance. It is annoying, especially when occasionally someone uses ‘Lemmy’ to refer to lemmy.ml.

            • comfy@lemmy.ml
              0·
              3 年前

              In the context of federated communities, I am not against such monolithic communities existing.

              That doesn’t mean every community must be monolithic, or even should be monolithic! I’m actively involved in some communities that clearly benefit from not being monolithic, aiming to be those open societies that you referred to, because that’s aligned with their purpose. But for others, not being monolithic is anti-productive or even an existential threat for smaller platforms. This is especially relevant for niche communities that face outside attack or sudden infamy. If a platform is about a specific topic, and there are popular alternative places for people who won’t productively discuss that topic, I see no harm in omitting them from that group.

              For some communities, like social groups, evolving makes sense and is compatible with its purpose for existence. However, if the direction of the community is driven suddenly by an influx of naive new users and the direction contradicts the sole purpose of the community, I fail to see how that’s not a harmful thing. It’s recuperation. If, for example, I start a small community of hundreds to discuss how society could benefit from not being designed around cars as a primary mode of transport, and it fosters constructive radical innovation on urban design principles that are valuable to society and case studies on how cities benefit or lose from redesigning transport, but then after making a news headline quickly becomes flooded by a few thousand naive progressives who soon shift the main topic of the community to be shallowly talking about news of cars becoming more ‘green’ and how to improve roads and cars and how electric cars are so much better for the environment than regular cars and dogpilling anyone who criticizes improvements in car design, then I see that as a travesty. There was a niche platform that enabled advanced, radical discussion without distraction, suddenly replaced by a pool of shallow circlejerking that, hooray, more people can feel welcome in, but now is nothing special or useful to society. That community didn’t evolve, it was replaced and removed. That is a loss to the greater open society that the focused community is a subset of. The open society thrives on diversity of opinion and allowing that diversity to foster into developed ideas instead of being smothered by the status quo.

              Lemmy and lemmy.ml explicitly have different purposes. lemmy.ml’s purpose is not aligned with making every redditor feel welcome. Welcoming everyone would contradict its topic and hinder specialized discussion with distractions.

              Lemmy, on the other hand, is more aligned with making every redditor feel welcome. It is the broader society that lemmy.ml is a subset of. I am not in favor of Lemmy being monolithic. I am in favor of lemmy.ml sticking to its broad but non-mainstream topic, and if you want to call that monolithic, then so be it.