No Stupid Questions

The philosophy behind FOSS is inherently left wing and anarchist; communities working together to provide and produce tools for the common good, without a profit motive. Coupled with the lack of advertising and promotion of the sites, people have to seek them out, leading to a self-selecting user population that skews left :)

1. Probably the open source nature of Lemmy but also...

2. Are you an American? Based on US politics, much of the world would be "left wing" when much of it is really largely just moderates. Politics have been pushed so far to the right in the US that most politicians range from far right to moderate right, democrats included. Despite all the noise far right people are making about "the left", there's almost no far left representation in US government at all. Many of the people they're talking about are just moderates and fellow conservatives that aren't right wing enough in their view.

I mean you signed up on lemmy.marxism-leninism. Yeah they tend to lean left, lol.

But yeah your observation indeed is is correct. Not only does lemmy lean left it often leans pretty far left too. It might feel like a breathe of fresh air but it's still a bubble and echo chamber. It's the same as truth social but the exact opposite. Nothing wrong with that per-se but it's a good thing to keep in mind. Factual information is regularly downvoted here not because it's false but because it doesn't fit the narrative.

Because reality has a left-wing bias.

It has to do with profit motive. The Fediverse, and the Lemmy sub-protocol, arose when for-profit enterprises (TwitX and Reddit, respectively) began prioritizing their own bottom line over the enrichment of their users.

This has always been the Faustian bargain of social media: you are the product and you receive free content at the cost of advertisements and data mining.

Once the monopolists of the social sphere overstepped their bounds - got too invasive, or tried extracting value directly from the end user - free alternatives formed.

Naturally, the only people self-aware enough to be put off by the exploitation of these monopolists were left-leaning. There’re a lot of people out there who will pay to be cocooned in an echo chamber (viz Truth Social) but leftists like to pretend they’re too good for that shit.

So here we all are, enjoying a methodone drip of social media without all of the optimization and dopamine-tweaking hooks that for-profit socials live by.

It’s not a bad outcome, really, and if someone somehow wants to start a counter-culture right wing node on the fediverse, nothing is stopping him except a total lack of willing participants.

Say what you will about leftists; at least they try new things - and conservatives, as you would expect from the name, do not.

This almost feels like bait, your instance is Lemmy.ml. The ml stands for Marxist-Leninist, your home instance is literally the home for far-left ideology. You'll still see a leftist bant for the reasons commenters have mentioned, but the single biggest reason is that your instance is owned and operated by them.

One could argue that as alot of us are exredditors we would be the more progressive or left side of the crowd. Something happened we didn't like so we left it behind for something we hope will be better and put in the effort to make it so as opposed to staying with what we know and really waiting things out before choosing a new direction. It would have been easy to stay with reddit, hell I could go back in an instant and it would be like I never left, but I chose this new path and I'm sticking with it. That is what progress is all about

People seeking to be free from corporate overlords, and desiring a place to speak their minds and who also don't have an issue with spending a little time and effort tend to have a more liberal mindset. Regrettably as primates, we also have a tendency to form tribes and give short shrift to any viewpoints outside of those we ourselves believe in. I personally would prefer a dialogue of equals where we can debate our differences and agree to disagree or even find the places where we do agree and can come together. However, that enlightened state of being escapes most all of us. Instead, I will regress to thumping my chest and hooting at you.

the right loves corporations it doesn't go out of its way to avoid them

There are sections of both the right and the left that have anti-authoritarian tendancies.

The libertarian right tends to view things purely in terms of government over reach, whilst the left tends to view things in terms of the power of capital.

Leftists saw Facebook pushing propaganda for the highest bidder, Reddit trying to be safe to sell to investors and twitter basically becoming a project to reflect Elon Musk's personal opinions.

Out of that came a bunch of attempts at creating new social networks. The right wing attempts were not cognisant that the aforementioned were the natural result of trying to get rich off it, while the left attempted to make it impossible to get into that position.

I think all the right wingers who were dissatisfied with reddit migrated to voat?

I wouldn't say FOSS is inherently leftist, but it's certainly not a capitalist approach.

And Lemmy has been developed by two outspoken Marxists, so the earliest adopters before the larger waves of reddit exilees had a similar mindset.

Add to the fact that most of the oldest and therefore largest communities are hosted on lemmy.ml, which is run by the original devs, and features moderators who by and large also share a similar mindset (and suppress critical comments quite a bit), and you've got a lefty echo chamber going, that's spilling into the newer communities on neutral instances, giving the whole platform a left touch.

Education.

No for real, a lot of right-wing thinking comes from just parroting disinformation and being in their own echo chamber circles.

Educated people are more likely to 'lean left':

Environment: Higher education institutions often emphasize critical thinking, questioning of traditional norms, and exposure to diverse perspectives. This can lead individuals to adopt more progressive or liberal views.

Diversity: College and university settings are typically more diverse, exposing students to different cultures, ideas, and lifestyles.

Rationalism: Educated individuals may place a higher value on scientific reasoning and empirical evidence, which can align more with policies and positions typically associated with the left, such as support for climate change action and public health initiatives.

Perspective: Higher education can lead to an understanding of economic inequality and systemic issues. Educated individuals might support policies aimed at reducing inequality and improving social welfare.

Career: Many educated individuals work in fields such as academia, healthcare, and social services, where left-leaning values like equity, public good, and social justice are prevalent.

Generational: Younger generations, who are more likely to be college-educated today than in the past, tend to have more progressive views on social issues, such as LGBTQ+ rights and racial equality.

Education is also 'pushed' by a lot of adults when I was a kid. I thought it was kinda normal / lame because duh, of course it's important. I didn't get grasp deepl WHY until I was older and realized it's really a root causal issue of today's problems.

People looking for a Reddit alternative don't tend to be conservatives and liberals. r/worldnews fits their needs perfectly.

Thus the migration is either to a left platform like Lemmy, or truth social etc for super right winger.

Right-wing propaganda would have you believe that most good things are left-wing (and thus bad).

It skews young, and young skews left.

Now if only young voted…

I think it's more that you don't get many right-wing extremists and the mods don't protect the ones that do exist from seeing things they don't like.

There are still a lot of neoliberal kind of conservatives on lemmy, and then also right-wing types in the form of tankies, but for the most part I think the light touch by most of the moderators means that facts (which favor the "left") tend to be allowed to persist in a way they don't on many social media that see profit in extremist content.

For the most part, the same ethos that powers the Fediverse is the same ethos that powers all open-source. So naturally the people that would be more keen to adopt it are the people who believe in the Open Source model in general.

I can't think of anything less right-wing than open source; it's essentially software communism ("from each according to their ability to each according to their need") Sharing isn't a right-wing value.

Maybe because it was originally developed as a platform to discuss Marxism and Leninism?

I think people here tend to question and fact-check posts and comments a lot, which is a healthy thing. Now some say reality skews left, in which case could it be that the right have left because the left is right?