Fediverse

No echo-chamber is stronger for it. It's a weakness.

I view the focus on Lemmy's political opinions as a weakness for attracting new users.

I think its one of the reasons reddit will never reach the mainstream like reddit. For one people find it confusing to find a community which I disagree with, you just need to take a slight effort to understand that you have a choice of community and in return you get great freedom. Since its mostly for more techies I and its overwhelmingly like left, people with moderate right views will feel like they're completely out of place.

Im also sad that many of the bigger communities like ml have unhinged mods that ban for anyone disagreeing with them. For example some calls for violence being overwhelmingly onesided on here made me feel sick at times. But I don't feel like sparking that debate over here.

Weakness.

Limited range of political views breeds echo chamber. In my experience, you can't really have meaningful discussion inside an echo chamber. Disagreement, compromise, nuance doesn't exists inside an echo chamber. Just that same idea repeated over and over again.

Gonna be honest, you can't have meaningful and nuanced discussion here. Everything is black and white. Capitalism? It's the worst thing on earth. Religious people? Those people are idiots. Don't YOU dare use Windows, use Linux instead. ALL cops are bad, no exception.

This kind of things makes me actually scared of recommending people to Lemmy. I'm sure most people are casual people who doesn't have extreme views on anything. Just some people who wants to shut their brain off and scroll. I feel like the echo chamber I mentioned will put most people off.

Going tangent a bit--In general fediverse is not diverse.

When you scroll, you realize most of the post comes from the same kind of political ideas, same country (USA), same beliefs, etc.

You can't spell fediverse without spelling diverse, yet I feel like fediverse is anything but diverse.

This needs to change.

I think it's both. I can avoid having to engage with cruel or shitty perspectives as often, but I also don't love spending so much social time in an echo chamber, it's not great for you.

I think echo chambers are really bad for a culture and for people immersed in them, but like not seeing Nazi shit is certainly nice

It's certainly a weakness, especially since the Lemmy echo chamber is ever more extremist than the echo chambers you'd find on a place like Reddit or Truth Social. But I don't think it makes it uniquely bad. I wouldn't worry about it too much.

@crimeschneck Personally I've decreased my Lemmy usage a lot due to its echo chambery-ness. I avoided the political subs since day one, both since I'm personally not a big politics junkie and because I'm not in alignment with Lemmy's specific brand of politics, but things also extend to other topics as well.

A lot of the enjoyment of using Lemmy is getting news/articles and seeing what people think, but even in the tech spaces the range of tech news is somewhat limited and the top comments are almost always in line with Lemmy's specific tech thoughts (regardless of my agreement, I'd like to see interesting thoughts/commentary, if I can predict the theme of what's said it becomes less interesting). Sorting by new did help a little, even if a dissenting but well thought out idea was downvoted to oblivion I could still read it - but the value of link aggregators to me is articles + strangers thoughts, and if all the strangers have the same thoughts then I might as well stick with RSS.

My 2c anyways.

It would compromise what we are to allow nazis and their ilk in here

Mixed opinion these days often reads more like outright polarization vs balanced discussions.

It is a weakness.