Asklemmy

A community of leftist privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers

I know you already mentioned this, but... should an online car community be concerned about the lack of cyclists on their forum?

There is https://wolfballs.com/ as a Lemmy instance that is more right-leaning and you are always free to host your own.

"Centrism" isn't really a position one can have... what you mean is "in support of the status quo" which is IMHO also right leaning as it is inherently conservative.

The recent influx of Genzedong users definitely lowered the discussion quality here, but beyond those lemmygrad.ml users there is actually quite some ideological diversity in the Lemmyverse. Maybe consider signing up on an instance that does not federate with lemmygrad.ml 🤷

Literally described as being a community of "leftists"

Those rules apply to lemmy.ml, not to lemmy as a whole. For example, I'm in sopuli.xyz, and these are its rules.

Just tell me why lemmy.ml should necessarily be ideologically diverse? To be in permanent chaos and useless fights? I think there is already plenty of such platforms...

It is mostly communist, and that is very good

I understand what you are saying. Echo Chambers are absolutely dangerous.

People need to be exposed to views that don't necessarily align with theirs. That way they can expand their viewpoint.

Having said that, this is just one site among many. Not every website has to hold multiple views. Taking the internet as a whole, there are a variety of websites that people can get differing opinions and viewpoints.

Now that I think about it, it sounds good in theory but I know many far-right people that don't attempt to look for alternative sources. They just keep delving down the same Rabbit Hole instead of looking for differing views. So you might be on to something.

I'm going to paste my comment from a similar topic:

I find that conversation flourishes when you limit it to a certain degree. In spaces which are completely open and have a massive range of opinion, what you’ll find is mostly yelling at each other over broad talking points that everyone is already familiar with. After a while, nothing of interest comes out of the far left clashing with the far right all the time. But when you limit it, time can be spent doing other things than yelling at the dickhead on the other side who you have little to no overlap with and see as a dire enemy. You can talk about nuances in principles, differences in organizing, etc. It makes for richer, more interesting conversation.

There's also quite a huge range within the umbrella of leftism, and honestly we already have a huge enough gap there that there's a lot of worthless clashing. Broadening that would only make the site worse.

very diverse... got communist, anarchist, but everyone speak english

What should be an approach for this alleged lack of diversity? Lemmy is an open platform where everyone can join, not restricted to any personal characteristic, and assume the identity that best matches them.

So, IMHO, there is no problem to solve.

this instance may not be, but the fediverse is. that's kinda the whole point.

Oh, you're a capitalist? Show me your vast swaths of capital then

Second follow up - There is a good question here in that you want to engage on the lemmy platform, but did not necessarily land on the right server. I note that if you try to sign up on lemmy.ml it states at the top of the sign up page Before you register on lemmy.ml, please have a look at Joinlemmy to see if there is an instance that better fits your region, language or interests. Did you look at this page or go past and quickly jump on to see what things were about. Did you look at the content posted on lemmy.ml before deciding to join?

I think the problem is that there does need to be a certain amount of anti-establishment to even be interested in a place like Lemmy, there don't tend to be a lot of anti establishment centrists (those who call themselves as such are for the most party just rightwingers).

While I do agree that ideological diversity is good, one does need to be careful when trying to enact it because you might end up with a place like r/polititicalcompassmemes (though that particular cesspit is probably a different thing entirely).

The main issue when it comes to spreading FOSS alternatives to big tech is that how interesting a social media space is is almost directly related to how much activity there is on it, to be frank there really isn't much going on here. How we get people to show up and adapt it for themselves is that we ourselves be more engaged in it and spread the word elsewhere off-site

Ultimately, Lemmy is a Reddit clone and one problem with Reddit-like platforms is the upvote/downvote system heavily promotes groupthink since dissenting opinions are downvoted into oblivion while consensus opinions are promoted. Lemmy attempts to solve this problem by being open source, self-hostable, and federated (which are all great things), but these aspects alone can't totally solve the inherent groupthink problem, it just makes it easier for those with differing views to spin off and start their own instances, which will likely have their own groupthink.

As politically centrist myself, I've basically just unsubscribed from the political communities and focus on the more tech-related ones. If an apolitical or more centrist political Lemmy instance which federated with lemmy.ml was started there's a good chance I'd join.

I don't want more right wingers to join because I don't think they have much useful things to say (I think this as a former right winger) but I do think there is diversity beyond the left and right spectrum that would help lemmy some.

There's not a lot of women here. There's not much stuff related to hobbies outside of tech. Politics is heavily driven by the ML context of the broader lemmy community. I'd love to see some discussions of social democratic policy stuff, not because I think it's better but because there's only so many times you can listen to people rehash Das kapital in the comments. What about some MMT stuff? What about liquid democracy or people experimenting with holocracy etc?

Because capitalism and other liberal ideologies are inherently exploitative.

>ideologically diverse

Smells like centrism