Most open-source and small software projects are somewhat political. That is because people need a reason to leave the big companies, for many it is leftism, privacy concerns or a search for more personal freedom. Rightwingers end up here as well, but many also go to their own toxic silos, because they have different end goals.
Founder effect, to a limited extent. The people who developed Lemmy started lemmy.ml, a server (aka instance) specifically for “leftist privacy and FOSS enthusiasts”. This was the description that they chose for the server and a significant portion of the people who joined the server did so because of that description. Leftist is a political term.
By design, Lemmy can be pointed at different servers for different content. You can pull up https://join-lemmy.org/instances for some ‘approved’ servers. A given server could be right-leaning, centrist, or totally apolitical. It may be that you chose to join lemmy.ml because it seems to be the most active lemmy instance. It currently is, but it also happens to have a lot of users who are interested in politics.
Ultimately the answer to your question is “Because you linked up your app with a lemmy server that chooses to focus on politics.”
I don’t think the majority joined this server for its leftism. People joined because it’s called “lemmy.ml” and seems to be official/ “the right one”. I believe many people actually get scared away from lemmy when their feed suddenly gets filled with communism. Who had the glorious idea to build a decentralized network but at the same time give its own server the name of the network ??
I don’t have any solid data to back up my ‘significant portion’ comment above, other than the fact that I see a lot of active users on lemmy.ml who seem content with the leftist vibe on the server. Not a very good basis for making such a broad statement. Whoops!
It’d be interesting to dig deeper into the issue through polling or something similar, but this type of self-sorting is probably hard to capture. People who read the description and choose not to join aren’t around to vote in a poll and neither are people who get scared away by what they see. For other ‘apps’, it’d be possible to catch some data from the second category of people by exit-polling people who choose to delete their accounts.
Your question was probably rhetorical, but I went ahead and did a search since I didn’t know the background. From the AMA that I found it looks like two people developed Lemmy from scratch and their only financing was obtained through donations. I don’t blame them if they wanted to call dibs on the most obvious server name and make ground rules for it that appealed to them.
I 100% joined this instance because it’s left-wing (and seemed less tankie than the other left-wing instances)
The whole point of the fediverse is that there is no “right” or “default” server.
If you think “Lemmy.ml” is misleading people into thinking that the server is official, what about “Lemmy.ca”? Or “Lemmy.pt”? There are plenty of instances that follow the same format. Same with mastodon.social, run by the devs, and the countless other mastodon.* domains.
Everything is political. The notion that you can do things and have them not have political consequences and be politically informed is a total falsehood and illusion.
This app is just honest and upfront about its politics, in contrast to something like Reddit which is “apolitical” which just means the admins explicitly support the status quo.
It is fascinating to me that you refer to this site as an app. If you wouldn’t mind, I have some questions:
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Approximately what year were you born?
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What app are you using to access lemmy?
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What constitutes an “app” in your mind? Do computers have “apps” or only phones?
As to your question: everything is political :)
I discovered Lemmy on my laptop…but there is a F-droid app for it. That I am using right now
I find the mobile version through a mobile browser is pretty amazing. Far better than any app I’ve used to access this instance.
Edit: doing so also brings your theme that you choose in your profile settings. Pic below as an example
What is this and why does it look like MS-DOS?
i386 theme in the Lemmy settings for your account.
Ha, the “what year you were born?” question is pretty funny. I think it’s probably accurate that many younger people identify websites as “apps,” but software engineers like myself also sometimes do that. It’s just a change in the vocabulary that probably doesn’t propagate to older folks who aren’t in the industry. Although my uncle is in the industry as well, and I think he, too, would balk at the notion of calling this an “app.”
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The English writer Wells went to the Soviet Union a few years ago and visited Maxim Gorky, a great writer who is gone today. He proposed the creation of a literary club from which politics would be excluded, for, to his mind, literature is literature and politics is politics. Gorky and his friends, it seems, began to laugh and Wells was annoyed. The fact is Wells saw the writer as being outside of society, while Gorky and his friends knew full well that it just is not so in life, where, in truth, all things are linked together—whether we like it or not.
This doesn’t explain anything. What an unnecessary anecdote. Everyone can abstain from being too political, including the Lemmy admins
Could you give me an example of something that isn’t too political in your eyes?
The PeerTube network. The organization behind it, Framasoft, doesn’t push radical views on its users. And, more importantly, the instance of the developers (framatube.org) is nowhere near being the center of the network, while lemmy.ml is the focal point of lemmy. The admins of lemmy have the responsibility to not be too political as the whole network relies on this server.
Peertube has a massive neo Nazi problem because all the far rights that got banned from YouTube moved there.
This reminds me of my favorite quote from Sally Bowles in the play “Caboret” just before Hitler took over Berlin…“it’s just politics, it doesn’t matter”
It did and it does.
The developers actually do a pretty good job of keeping politics out of the app itself and in the lemmy.ml instance instead, so the title of this post is quite misleading.
One thing people need to understand that lemmy.ml is not inteded to be a generalist flagship instance (like mastodon.social is to Mastodon), even if it’s maintained by the lead developers of the project.
https://www.matterprints.com/journal/community/the-privilege-of-being-non-political/
The ability to choose to be non-political, and to demand conversations or spaces be non-political is evidence of an invisible privilege not accessible by all.
The software isn’t political, instances can be though
I guess the license is a bit polical though
How exactly is “I’m sharing my code with you so you have to share improvements you make to it back to me” considered political?
How is it not?
It shouldn’t be =\
Reddit is political as well. Besides the propaganda you see of commodities, services, courses, stores, and other stuff for marketing purposes, Reddit has explicitly banned communities which were growing with political discourse against exploitation and corporate control of society.
There’s no such thing as something “not political”. If you are indifferent to reality, you are inadvertently allowing oppression, exploitation, discrimination to continue happening. To be consciously political is to criticize the current state of things, study their causes and fight for its solution. Otherwise, what’s the point of living, if not to constantly improve our lives collectively?
ADMINS ARE G@Y
y is ur mom so pollitical??
I think it’s just that the flagship instance yours is not only political, but run by the devs as well. Plus the hard coded word blacklist and whatnot lol
Right wing and free speech instances are merely reactionary since the flagship platform is political when it should be the other way around
The blocklist only removed some slurs that were racist or nasty AF.
Anyone who feels their ability to express themselves is restricted by not having those phrases available should just fuck right off outta here.
That sort of attitude being mainstream is why Lemmy is probably the most divisive piece of Fediverse software out right now.
The blocklist only removed some slurs that were racist or nasty AF.
I literally got censored once for trying to post an article about Ted Cruz being called the b word, because it had the b word in the title.
Right wing and free speech instances
There is more than one?
What is reactionary? And why is it bad?
There is more than one?
Actually not that I know of, just wolfballs.com, but I assume there are far more lemmy instances that I just forgot about
What is reactionary?
Making free-speech instances in response to the main instance
And why is it bad?
A couple reasons, firstly, it solidifies Lemmy’s reputation as a platform for leftists, and seconds, it unnecessarily divides and isolates right wing users and instances from most Lemmy users who abide by the mainstream Lemmy perspective.
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By the way, shitposting has to be one word, otherwise it has an entirely different meaning.
I don’t think this instance wants right wing content at all. Or users.
I would tbh. If there was a good neutral instance, I would join it.
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Lol I clicked on a link to your instance and it’s literally just Trump Qanon fash circlejerk
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A couple reasons, firstly, it solidifies Lemmy’s reputation as a platform for leftists
This website literally describes itself as
A community of leftist privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers
Are you lost? I really don’t get people like you.
I’m not lost, just mentioning that making your software partisan (either by design or reputation) will limit success and utility of the software in a way that’s unnecessarily harmful
You realize the purpose of this site isn’t profit or a popularity contest, right? It’s a space for leftists, how hard is that for you to wrap your head around?
