this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2022
-1 points (47.1% liked)
Asklemmy
43810 readers
1514 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.