Fediverse

I'm interested in this, i left reddit due to that, if it's just a reddit 2.0 i'm better getting off. So far it looks samey.

Conservatism is generally a worthless ideology that makes the world worse, so I don't feel a desire to spend more time with it. We don't need to debate "what if women don't have rights", "what if gay stuff is illegal?", "what if you had to pay for health care so if you were poor you'd just die?" or whatever.

As a non-American the issue as I see it is that too much of Lemmy is dominated by Americans and therefore American politics. I scroll through and read a ton of comments about how monstrous and vile the right wing is, and that's just simply not true where I live. The popular American right is incredibly authoritarian and seeks to control all aspects of ones life. The right wing in my country is purely economic. You can debate capitalism vs communism I guess but no part of my countries right wants to remove the rights of women or the lgbt. Its all just a matter of where you live. And most people here live in the States.

There appears to be a lack of “centrist”

“Progressive” liberals in fact the centrists—they're center-left at best—and there are plenty of them here.

right-wing voices (and I don’t mean extreme MAGA-type views, but rather more moderate conservative positions)

These people are liberals as well, but because they usually break Lemmy’s code of conduct regarding various bigotries, they get usually quickly the boot.

non-political

Everything social is political, and the fediverse is social media.

I’ll offer this thought…

When I used to discuss politics with someone who viewed policy from the perspective of a different political party say 25-30 years ago, I would say 90-95% of what we wanted to see happen in the country was exactly the same. The differences were in how we wanted to get there.

Unfortunately, today I don’t think that the views align much any more. The views have diverged, and at least on the right, they have become extreme to the point of openly courting fascism, government capture by the oligarchy, and the masses supporting this don’t care about the consequences so long as they think they have a punitive moral victory over their opponents. The left isn’t really the left anymore, and I’m not sure what they want for the country. I don’t think they know either. They seem more interested in inclusivity than they do in actually making economic policy benefitting anyone under the upper middle class level.

All that said, I have yet to encounter one single instance of a conservative view on lemmy that wasn’t radical and antagonistic. I have also encountered far left views that were also radical and antagonistic. Far more hard left views than right, perhaps because there are so many hard left views the right stays away.

I don’t have the answer to what would increase the breadth of political content in Lemmy discussions, but the highly polarized and emotional views of politics along with internet anonymity isn’t really a recipe for balanced discussion. We haven’t even touched on organized propaganda deliberately pushing inflammatory posts and lies that incite reactionary and extreme views in return.

Lemmy has always had the Communists and Anarchists, from what I understand. Liberals largely came during the Reddit fiascos. Overall, I'd say instances are becoming more homogenous, but I don't think that's a bad thing necessarily. I'd rather have more leftists and fewer liberals seeing liberals convert to leftists, IMO.

Given how likely right wing conservatives tends to spread misinformation and cite low quality sources, I honestly don't mind the lack of right wingers.

Reason and Science has always a left leaning bias. Simply because Nature doesn't give a shit about individual feelings or if someone believes if homosexuality is wrong. Nature does it's thing an humans who accept and understand this are not left-leaning but normal.

Corporate Social Media is manipulated like hell to shift the bias. That's it.

There is no such thing as a "moderate conservative" any more. IMO the difference has always been mainly, how mask off they were prepared to go. Trump has shown them that you can go fully mask off without any negative consequences.

Liberals are not leftists.

Conservative and/or right wing, authoritarian, reactionary (feel free to pick your favorite analogous label) views are ethically wrong and lack evidence to add a worthy perspective to discussions. Capitalism is a belief and should be discussed as other religions.

@Teknevra
I'm not a part of Lemmy, but I will say this: There are some people with whom reasonable dialog is just not possible. Speaking only for myself, I choose not to engage. That does not mean I'm not aware of what they are saying or thinking. It means that I am drawing a healthy boundary for myself.

Your feelings about it are valid. You should absolutely seek out more mixed spaces, if that is what you want to do.

Cheers!

Conservatives can quite frankly go somewhere else.

Their policies are terrible and the only redeeming qualities of most countries we live in are socialist.

Lemmy should reflect the actual political spectrum which is (IMO) Social Democrats on the far right and Tankies on the far left.

I think the problem is in the opposite direction. Society is too ideologically homogeneous in being against socialism. The major narratives are controlled by nation-states and corporations, social media are infested with political advertisement and propaganda.

So, as others say, I believe it is sorta uninformed and middle-of-the-road fallacy to find a corner of the internet where you can speak your mind without being harassed by white supremacist trolls, and say we need more diverse views.

Right wingers have (had) Parlel, Gap, TruthSocial, now they have X, and Facebook, where they were also dominating and harassing in the past. No leftists and/or genderqueer person would survive a day at these platforms.

But Lemmy being primarily/explicitly leftist is the problem, and you suddenly are alarmed for echo chambers. This is not quite fair, now is it.

As for Lemmy per se, I don't think it is too homogeneous. I debate centrists and liberals every other day. And recent discussions showed that the amount of latent transphobia in the site is shocking, with people knowing next to nothing apart from 4chan/MAGA talking points.

How can this happen after all these years of activism and outreach. It is because of the ecosystem of echo chambers in the broader communications and media landscape. This discourse never reached those people.

Considering it was the position of major medical and professional organizations, it shows that the pathology lies with the existing social media and broader media enterprizes, with a prominently selective messaging.

Do I need to say that this led to widespread science-denialism for which mainstream platforms are clearly to blame?

If your inquiry is honest, then the only explanation is that the propaganda apparatus works so well, that the (relative) absence of the dominating narratives makes you anxious that you entered an echo chamber, when in fact you probably have been in an echo chamber so far.

Seems like lemmy.world already provides plenty of right wing perspectives, we really don't need me.

Lack of fake accounts/trolls like on other platforms and you'll have that.

My instance has conservative and anti-leftist communities. They're more the personal playgrounds of a few people with humiliation and persecution fetishes though.

There are plenty of people on the fediverse that are clearly free and independent thinkers - as in not operating from inside a bubble where they get fed opinions and views from others and them regurgitating those views ad nauseam. On Lemmy, I see a lot of curiosity and a lot of people who were probably censored or effectively buried by downvotes on other platforms, despite their good faith and interesting (and sometimes radical) perspectives.

Discussion flows well, there's less focus on upvotes/downvotes and there is no karma. There doesn't seem to be a tradition of dog-piling people who wrong-think according to the group consensus (or whatever neoliberal narrative is prevailing) as there is on Reddit. Moderation is much less heavy-handed and there are no shadowbans/comments that don't show up for others (but only for yourself). There are significantly less bots and almost zero astroturfed content, as well.

Worry less about the labels, I say. If you want mainstream or conservative opinions, it's very easy to seek them out - the internet is full of those perspectives. If you're curious, you could play devil's advocate and discuss current events or other hot topics from a mainstream perspective and ask others why they think differently to better understand the userbase on the fediverse and how things generally go down here. I'm sure plenty of people would be happy to weigh the pros and cons of different viewpoints and perspectives and entertain a discussion about certain issues in good faith.

Not everybody is filtering everything out from a polarized lens and is focused on being an absolutist or purist with their preferred ideology.

The thing about the right wing is that it always boils down to the cruelty being the point. People play it up -just- being a difference of opinion like we're talking about whether or not pineapple is good on pizza; when the opinions in question are that brown people are inferior, trans people people don't deserve rights, a woman's life is worth less than a fetus, etc: there's no valuable dialogue to be had. Ban the fucker and don't look back.

The closest thing to valuable dialogue you're going to get with that garbage is the bullshit veneer they slap onto their vitriol to make it easier to sell - the whole white knight bit about protecting babies or bathrooms or some other nonsense that conveniently lands the same outgroups into a bind every single time. If you think any of that shit is in good faith, you've fallen for a trap before the conversation even starts.

Diversity of thought is great, up until we start turning to hatred/bigotry for a fresh perspective. Those are not welcome here, nor should they be anywhere else.

I find circles around .world to be more liberal and not leftist. (Not that there aren't any on .world... Just leans that way)

There's not much in terms of right wing spaces but tbh I'm uh, completely fine with that.

Wait you're saying that calling people nazis if they have a different viewpoint than you doesn't foster diversity? Who would have thought.