Ask Lemmy

“I don’t care about politics, but it really bothers me that you guys don’t like Republicans” lol

Maybe don’t cry about people shitting on the party trying to erase people from existence and force women to make health choices they don’t want?

Lemmy is not a single site owned by a single group. Each Lemmy instance is in effect its own website and they can communicate with each other which Is the federation part. Some instances cater to certain kinds of people and communities will skew towards a political direction.

If you are a hardcore right winger there are instances full of right wing extremist waiting for you to join their echo chamber. Same with the left wing nuts, there exist Lemmy instances specifically for them to congregate together. You can do some hunting and find them easily.

The only thing is that most other Lemmy instances will defederate from these kinds of instances since political extremist on either side tend to be hateful and zealous individuals who vocally express their violent fantasies of lynching anyone who doesn't 100% agree with them. Most lemmyverse instances deem this kind of hateful speech unacceptable and will block them from cross - communicating.

Here is an example of a right wing Lemmy community:

https://communities.win/c/TheDonald/

It feels like you're fishing for a "go fuck yourself, and your poorly disguised concern trolling" comment. Congrats, you've caught one.

There aren't two sides to every issue, reasonable people can't differ on everything. Your trump example illustrates this perfectly: at this point no reasonable person has a positive view of him.

Heavy US bias on the site. There is nothing Republicans have done over the years to garner any support from rational humans. Sometimes things seem very one-sided because they fucking are.

That said, I installed the lemmy keyword filter userscript which has been doing a decent job of keeping shit I don't want to see (god damn reddit posts) off my feed.

"is email a biased platform?"

If you're on a Lemmy instance that federates with ExplodingHeads, you would probably see the opposite results (since they are very pro-Trump).

I always wonder about these 'omg bashing on trump' questions. It's because he's a highly confrontational jerk who makes a living from being controversial. To extend your analogy, yeah, if Chevy uh, was constantly insulting 60% of the country while ripping people off and tried to overthrow the government, people would probably be complaining about them in the same way.

Your comparison is horrible tbh.

But what you're asking underneath it all is simple enough.

Lemmy isn't a single entity. It's dozens of instances (well, dozens of public ones big enough to notice), with multiple communities on each.

There is a bigger section of users that reject alt-right matters, which is an "oh no. anyway" situation because most instances also reject the left equivalent (tankies) with similar fervor. But there's communities that are quite friendly to non extremists that are what you'd call conservative overall, if you go looking. But the major instances are run by folks that lean liberal, progressive, and/or socialist. It's just a fact.

I hate to break this next part to you though. Any political based community, subreddit, or forum is going to be a dumpster fire of biased bullshit. And that goes for any segment of political ideology. That's because people that are emotionally invested in identity politics are nigh unto religious zealots. And they're the most likely to make posts and comments in those places. They're also the ones most likely to shoehorn in political bullshit where it doesn't belong.

That last part is a much bigger issue because it's harder to avoid.

But, dude, don't get it twisted. The whole trump part is to be expected. Anyone not expecting high vitriol regarding him is silly. Like, he's divisive intentionally. He just got indicted, so it's current news everywhere. This means the posts about him are certainly going to focus on the crimes he's accused of, which is going to be "negative" if you're a supporter. If you're neutral regarding him, it's still going to read negative because the shit he's accused of is pretty fucking negative lol. You can't report on someone accused of serious crimes and it not skew negative unless you ignore anything about the news that's factual.

But I'm not going to get started on the whole "moderator and suppression" bullshit because it's utter bullshit.

Also, your car analogy isn’t great. I can objectively say that the PT Cruiser is unsafe. That is hard to debate me on. I can objectively say Trump is a narcissist who throws his food on the wall and who is being indicted for multiple crimes both federally and in 2 other locations. It’s hard to deny those things.

Negative posts about a criminal? How strange!

That's the cycle of most new platforms. Early adopters are typically tech savvy and highly educated people, who in turn have a strong left tendency and also in general a tendency of questioning the status quo and wanting to improve and change things. It's fundamentally incompatible with conservatism overall, left or right leaning. A big part of conservative ideology is not just the usual fiscal responsibility yada yada, it's also resisting fast change and keeping traditions and existing lifestyles. Adopting bleeding edge platforms is bog change and trying out new things. New platforms also tend to reach the left worldwide before the right comes to it, so there will definitely also be a lot of anti-american bias before it essentially gets taken over by mostly americans. Even on Reddit you'd see people go like "Reddit is an english american site go back to your country" rhetoric that just wasn't there 5-10 years ago.

Facebook when it came out in the late 2000s also leaned very left, before it became mainstream and right wing people started using it too. Same with Twitter, same with even the very early Internet and BBSes and forums. Right wing people are the last to adopt new platforms, after hating on them for a few years.

That said, I think Trump is a bad example in this context. He's being charged with a third indictment, and done a lot of crime so even on Reddit and TikTok it's a huge flood of news about it.

Would also help for the right to not be seen as evil if they stopped attacking basic human rights and their stupid pointless war on "wokeness".

Lemmy isn't Reddit - there's no single central website. It's made up of instances that can have a whole range of political leanings (from the alt-right to tankies to no particular angle), if one doesn't suit you then look around for another. What you will find is that the general insurances tend to be more leftwing and anti-corporate because the bulk of members are here because they got tired of big business interfering with the more mainstream social media.

Also, you are presumably looking at the front page of lemmy.world and, considering Trump is currently in court on serious charges, it's no great surprise there are posts on him that don't show him in a flattering light.

Lemmy isn't a platform at all. It's a piece of forum software.

The platforms are the individual instances - lemmy.world or lemmy.ml or lemm.ee or whatever. There's well over 1,000 of them total. And they range all the way from extreme left to extreme right, and from rigidly constrained to entirely open.

And since it is the case that there are well over 1,000 instances, each of them privately owned and managed by whatever standards the owners prefer, there is no mechanism by which any particular bias can be maintained at anything above the instance level. That necessarily means that any lemmy-wide bias you might see can only be organic.

You might honestly think about that, and what it says about the ideology you're trying to pretend you're not defending.

And how is that any different from Reddit? If you waltzed into r/politics, you would have basically the same thing you just described.

OP, if you legitimately cared about getting a balanced view, then get a RSS reader and read news from either Associated Press and Reuters, or read news from outlets like Fox and CNBC. You can also just look for a right-leaning Fediverse instance because I can guarantee you that you can find one.

Is Lemmy a biased platform?

Yes, but not biased enough IMO

I'm a trans woman. On the fediverse at large, transphobia isn't tolerated. It gets shut down hard. Here on lemmy and kbin, it can go either way. Some places are happy to let transphobia slide, which means we have to deal with more hate on the day to day than we do with the rest of the fediverse.

I'd be happy to see more bias towards not indulging transphobes and their hate.

You're also forgetting that the internet doesn't revolve around the US. There are all kinds of nationalities on here, a mich wider range than Reddit (proportionally), and by far, the majority doesn't care what Trump has done or hasn't done.

You're getting downvoted and that's proving your point

"Bias" doesn't mean "I disagree with it". It means the speaker is being dishonest about their motives.

In the most simple sense, could Republican submissions survive

Probably not. But that has more to do with the insanity coming out of the Republican party than any sort of unfair "bias" against them. Lying down with dogs and so forth.

You will never be able to stop people having biases, I think we have learned that thus far. It is really hard to prevent no matter where you go. What Lemmy allows the individual to do is remove those constantly negative hate groups from being visible for them. Lemmy gives us options, you can block users, communities, and instances. Well that's great and all, but maybe you still want to see political content, just not negative stuff constantly.

Part of being federated is that we can have multiple politics communities of the same name on many different instances. If you have a power mod suppressing one community, you can go to another or create your own under your rules that you see fit. Some moderators and user dynamics do a really good job at removing biases as best they can for the sake of good journalism.

It is no easy feat to accomplish that, but Lemmy (and the fediverse in general) makes it possible to accomplish. You can't say that for many other social networks.

I'm sorry at this point if you don't see that Trump is a harmful idiot at best then I don't know what to tell you. Also, fuck Biden too in case you think this is a US republican vs democrat thing because it's not. People here are mostly left leaning and that extends beyond US politics and their democratic party. Is that a bad thing? Possibly but prominent self identified right wingers on the internet don't really offer very compelling reasons to listen to them in all honesty.

Server owners and admins, and communities creators and mods can set the tone of the communities they manage, of course.

If you think a car community is too ford-leaning you can look for or create another one, if it's the whole instance then subscribe to another instance cars community (I'm subscribed to the same communities from several instances, I guess it has to be pretty common), or even make an account in that other instance just in case the Chevy folk start hanging out with nazis, as they always end up doing, and the rest defederate from them.

Edit: oh! And you can block all the posts with a specific site as a source, so you can take away everything from fordnews.com and not see it anymore

Stay out of politics. Enjoy Lemmy.

Bud, a former president of the US has been indicted for 70 crimes in three different criminal cases, and is likely to be indicted with up to 8 additional crimes in a fourth case. This is the biggest set of indictments since Nixon. The notion that you would expect this not to be major news or that merely reporting on it suggests bias is mind-boggling.

It certainly leads credence to Steven Colbert’s claim, “Reality has a well-know liberal bias.”

I think c/politics itself is not very biased, but the website clearly is for unknown reason.
What I do is blocking any community displaying this behavior.

I didn’t read your whole wall of text but lemmy does have a strong alt-left / marxist / anti-western population