Hi! In thinking about how to help the fediverse grow, I wonder if there are more mainstream Lemmy instances?
I’ve pointed a couple folks to Lemmy.world and it’s uhhh, pretty hard Left for them (as one girl, who volunteered for the Democrats said “I just got yelled at because I can’t be Left wing unless I want to destroy capitalism? Which feels weird.”) We’re much farther Left than reddit which itself was definitely Left of centre…
I don’t know if decentralized open source social media actually attracts many mainstreamers but assuming we want to grow the fediverse, I’d like to have somewhere I can point people to without feeling very nervous for them.
Thanks!
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I can’t be Left wing unless I want to destroy capitalism?
Yes. Yes indeed you can’t. How to go about that is up for grabs but if you think that leftism is all about preserving the system that allows oligarchs to accumulate more capital and power, to allow a minority to exploit the majority, I don’t know what to tell you.
…besides that you’re probably American because only y’all are so damn confused about the whole topic.
Why not just join non-political communities and focus on the content that they enjoy. If people are nervous about meeting assholes on the internet perhaps they should stick to cable tv or netflix.
"I just got yelled at because I can’t be Left wing unless I want to destroy capitalism?
Based
Also shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between leftist and left wing from someone but this is America dammit it’s the culture
I’m on sh.itjust.works. Which is actually run like a democracy, funnily enough.
According to a post made in our Main Community, sh.itjust.works is the fifth largest Lemmy instance by total posts, after lemmy.world, hexbear.net, www.hexbear.net, and lemmygrad.ml. So figuring Hexbear got duplicated, and anyway hexbear and lemmygrad are commonly defederated with because tankies, that puts sh.itjust.works at #2 on this side of the Silicon Curtain.
It shows lemmy.world at 390k total posts, with sh.itjust.works at 65k. Sh.itjust.works has very, very few of THE communities people use. !Games!games@sh.itjust.works is the biggest one by subscriber count.
So sh.itjust.works is a popular place to access other instances from, and I think others like lemm.ee and lemmy.ca are in the same boat.
“Join this instance, they’re not as radical left as lemmy.whatever” misses the point. Who cares which door of the building you walked in through when everyone congregates in the same room anyway?
Wouldn’t really make much of a difference in what server you choose, if the goal is to get “away” from Lemmy.world. The majority of users is from there.
Maybe it’s not the server, but more the community that’s an issue for you?
Lemmy is different from Reddit in one important way.
Reddit is a product. You install the app, you look at the ads, the mods and admins curate an endless feed of cartoons and safe ragebait and awwwunexpectedsmiles.
Lemmy is an environment. If you’re passive, then any random thing may happen to you. So you have to be proactive in this environment.
- You could subscribe to communities that are non-politics/news, non-meme, non-tech, and browse these “subscribed” communities.
- You could use blocklists, as described elsewhere in this post.
- You could find an instance that does some of this work for you, by defederating and blocking certain types of opinions and behaviors. This seems to be what you want, and many people have provided suggestions.
These are all ok. But the one defining characteristic of Lemmy is that it is not just another product.
Please join a small instance. Lemmy doesn’t work if people don’t spread out. Just choose some small instance that seems chill. You can search and sub to any community. It really makes no difference.
Until the admin of a small instance decides to randomly leave the project one day and your account is gone forever. I’ve seen it happen multiple times and it’s why I go for bigger or at the very least, long standing instances.
Unless you’re willing to go with a very closed off instance you’re still going to be interacting with the broader fediverse which is very left.
I don’t think that’s really going to change unless there is another big migration and I don’t necessarily want it to. But I would like if Lemmings would be kinder to one another and realize that not having read 800 pages of leftist theory doesn’t mean you’re an evil imperialist. Everyone is on their own journey to understanding the world and I think a lot of people here are so judgmental that they would be fighting with their own past and future selves if they could meet them. It’s OK to disagree sometimes. Yes, even when people hold harmful views. We all do to some extent.
Not really, it’s taken me quite a while to curtail the content I see to just stuff I actually want to see. Keyword filters are helpful tho not perfect since a lot of people will self censor and thus bypass the keyword filters.
The instance you’re on only matters in so far as which other instances they’ve defederated.
You can probably find more centerist instances, but it doesn’t really matter because your friend is probably just going to be in the same communities anyways.I’m not really sure I’d call reddit left of center, though.
All I will point out is that the overton window in the US has shifted to the point where a double Sieg Heil at your president’s inauguration is within normal discourse .
Anyway, lemmy can be pretty “normie” for you so long as you stay out of political discussions. But if you want to actually discuss politics within the US overton window, lemmy is going to be very hostile. However if you come with an attitude to learn instead of debating/arguing, then I suspect most people wouldn’t flame you. But if one starts doing genocide denial for Israel etc, then they’re going to have a bad time.
shifted to the point where a double Sieg Heil at your president’s inauguration is within normal discourse
Haha thank you. I’m not even American but to me it’s pretty shocking to find out that this place, world of all instances, is too ‘extreme’ for people. Maybe I really am a dirty radical but I think that if people who consider themselves democrats are still fucking clutching their pearls about the left wing being too left wing while Elon Musk does open nazi salutes and trans people get their rights and dignity stripped away, then it’s no wonder the USA is so fucked.
You guys clearly need a new political party because your choices are overt right wingers, or spineless right wingers that like to pretend they represent the left.
Edit: maybe the bad men will see the light if we all hold hands and sing kumbaya. I’m sure that all of the people who are already finding themselves victims to this will thank you for taking the high road and not scaring too many centrists.
Db0 is the best instance with the least friction from mods and admins.
Reddit was only ever left of center for Americans. To many/most non Americans, America consists of a far right party and a center to center right party.
What you’re seeing is the result of a platform that wasn’t first created by and for American audiences, and whose initial takeup wasn’t dominated by American perspectives.
Agreed. I got lost at ‘Reddit is left…’
Huh?I’m not American.
Lemmy is much farther left than any of our national discourse.
I get that American parties are farther Right than most but the discourse here is much farther Left than almost all political discourse. Edit: I’m happy to be corrected, show me a serious party in a position of power in a Western democracy committed to ending capitalism!
I’m not saying that if you don’t want to destroy capitalism that you’re not left. I’m saying that the perspective that reddit itself was “definitely left of center” is not a widely shared perspective, and if you believe that reddit of all places was left of center, then lemmy, which actually is left of center, is going to feel very left of center.
I’d strongly disagree. I think reddit is generally on the left side of most cultural and political institutions.
To each their own though.
Then honestly you must live in some radically conservative country.
Canada.
No mainstream party suggests UBI as a matter of principle for example.
There it is.
Your “country” is a collection of mining and timber companies in a trench coat.
Who is much more left wing than Canada?
Our overton window is only a few degrees to the left of the US.
Also the Ontario Liberals conducted a UBI pilot in Hamilton during the 2010s with the goal of proposing some form of it as a policy if results were positive. The OLP lost to the PCs in 2018 and Ford canned the project.
Then there’s been the UBI experiment in Manitoba during the 70s.
I don’t think that UBI is the predominant reddit viewpoint either - I think that’s just the subs you’re in.
I’m Canadian too, and I certainly don’t consider reddit as left of center on average. It’s almost like 4chan lite.
But on that note, if you’re looking for Canadian instances, there are a few good ones.
The obvious one is lemmy.ca, but the other (bigger?) one is sh.itjust.works which is bilingual and I think is québécois.
Presumably a Canadian instance would have relatively Canadian political leanings, although as has been said before, instance doesn’t really matter.
I agree that most of Lemmy is rather cynical and very far lest
The world is a hugely diverse place that doesn’t easily fit into a left or right category from the perspective of politics in an individual country. While I agree that the US is a conservative country, this narrative is a bit exaggerated. The median global opinion on various issues would be all over the place from a US perspective, from far right to far left or even defying any categorization. As a result saying that the US is to the right of most of the rest of the world is a huge oversimplification.
The US has a nazi sympathising president, backed by a billionaire who gives nazi salutes in public. So I don’t agree that saying the US is to the right of most of the world is incorrect.
Well, there is a distinction between the the leadership and the populace. The context here was about the populace, since that is who is participating in these online conversations. I agree with you that the current government is an extreme right one. And yes many people did vote for this but I suspect many do not support his full agenda, they were just fooled into thinking this was the least bad option.
A nazi sympathising president was voted in, because the overton window has shifted sufficiently to the right to allow that to happen.
You’re going to get yelled at by lefties on any instance. That’s how federation works.
Yep, I got an absolute novel length comment from some far left .ml person as one of my first interactions on Lemmy.
I got told to go back to reddit on my very first comment. 🤣
Ouch.
Is your username a reference to this song by the way? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4LWIP7SAjY
Not really, ‘murmel’ means ‘marmot’ in Swedish but it’s often taken already so I’ve just evolved it into a marmalade-pun
Leftists famously hate other leftists
Well_theres-your-problem.gif
I guess… Well, I have trouble seeing the fediverse expand that far then. Which is fine but there have been a lot of pleas to make this a viable alternative to corpo social media.
The key is finding the communities you like and blocking the others, and users, that you dont.
There’s an up-front time-cost but it’s easy to adjust and makes for a great experience.
I don’t think it helps that politics absolutely dominates Lemmy, where Reddit has enough diverse subreddits that you could probably just avoid politics all together.
It’s much harder to get away from it here. But hopefully, as Lemmy grows then we start to see more and more users in the non political communities and people can have a laugh without people jumping down their throats. People just need to stick to it and give it a good go and help build something great.
It’s a circling the drain problem. Even though Lemmy is (slowly) expanding.
Lemmy doesn’t have the raw numbers userbase to just have anyone come in, and find a niche topic with an active community.
But because any average user can’t come in and just find their niche community, they don’t stay.
Meanwhile politics HAS active communities. So politics grow. And thats where Lemmy is growing.
But I can’t find a community for “How I met your mother”. A tv show that concluded like 10 years ago. But the show takes place in the future, recounting stories from “the past”. Which means, in real life, Tracy, the mother who Ted is talking about, died in 2024. The story is being told in 2036. But the show aired in real time during “the past”. Which means if Ted is talking about April 2008, that episode aired in April 2008. But the whole
98 seasons (real fans don’t count the 9th season that never happened) is being told in one afternoon in 2036. Which means we could be talking about the last ciggerrette of each character as they happen in real time. I think the next one is in 2028.Instead…we talk about trump here…and seemingly nothing else. Ever.
I’d like !clevelandguardians@fanaticus.social and /c/Cleveland to grow so we can talk about eyebrows and how great Jose Rameriez is.
That’s the thing though American politics get discussed here. With their perceptions of left and right.
An idea would be to allow “plug-in able” content sorting algorithms or content filters.
I hear so many stories of people slapping tons of filters in their clients (block all comments from ml users, block “Elon” and/or “Trump” keywords)… I think tons of people are running almost identical filters. Why not bake right into the Lemmy core the ability to pull filter sets from say, a public got repo?
Same with sorting. I’d love to have a “hot” algorithms that “punishes” posts based on comment sentiment analysis. Again, let me choose my sorting algorithm from a git repo. Let some person or persons develop a “good vibes” algorithm which keeps toxity off the top of my feed.
IMO, this is the way. Sorting by engagement has obvious issues. Introducing other weights to augment a system would make a huge difference in user experience.
You can’t change the people. Look at this comment section. OP said they don’t want to be yelled at and everyone took that cue to give a lecture. Completely no self awareness. Can’t change that.
But you can improve the algorithm. And IMO if you could crowdsource that dev in a way that doesn’t impose on mainline development.
Yeah, I like all these ideas. I wondered about some sort of pooled “ban/ignore” options at the individual level. So, rather than ignoring by an instance, if I trust that Janet has good tastes and filters out children and trump, maybe I can just have an ongoing list that draws from her blocks and vice versa if she feels similar.
Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. I really like the idea of people with likewise sensibilities being able to act as their own cross-community mod team, without impacting other groups with different sensibilities.
Last season was great. It was only the finale that sucked…
(and, yes, if you want a HIMYM community, just let me know and I can make it on https://metacritics.zone/)
I mean, yeah, go ahead and make it. But based on my quick look of your instance, none of the communities are active. That’s the part we need to work on for ALL your instance.
Yeah, and this is the part where Fediverser was supposed to help. Not just with the mirrors to help bootstrap the content, but also with the whole part of Community Ambassadors. Sadly, no one got into the ambassador part.
I don’t think it helps that politics absolutely dominates Lemmy, where Reddit has enough diverse subreddits that you could probably just avoid politics all together.
I think that’s the problem with all “alternative” social media… both ones that I like and stand behind like lemmy… and the opposite end, the Parlors, MeWe’s, Truth Social etc…
The point is… mainstream people talking about shows, video games etc… rarely hit any kind of limitations in the public spaces. I myself still go on reddit to see communities of specific shows, games etc… and… it’s fine for that. If I were to try and make the suggestion for a show or movie subreddit to move to lemmy, it would be a tough case.
The ones who see the flaws and limits of the corporate platform… are the ones either teetering at the edge of socially acceptable, or over it.
Whether that’s say us lefties that believe All Cops are Bastards, or right wing guys that think america was better in Jim Crow era. Bottom line is… people looking for alternatives, are doing so because the existing platforms are likely to censor them… which means the alternatives will be disproportionately more extreme.
Speak for yourself.
There were a lot of people that looked for a Reddit alternative not because of particularly strong feelings politically or towards corporations in general but instead because Reddit broke their main method of interacting with Reddit (third party mobile apps) while simultaneously completely breaking the moderator tools to quell the shitstorm and maintain quality discussion.
I left Reddit because I saw it going further to shit faster than it ever had before, and they communicated loud and clear that they didn’t want users like me that cared about having control and options over how we interacted with the site.
None of my accounts there ever had a single comment removed by a mod, although I had been preemptively banned from multiple subs due to posting in others.
Well yeah I wasn’t saying all of them are. I was saying a disproportionate amount of them. IE say anti-capitalist views that are 1 in 1000 on facebook, are 1 in 50 on reddit, and 2 of 5 on lemmy.
Yeah, please don’t give up. I need more people like you here.
Some instances have blocked the furtherist-left instances and banned the most abrasive users from those that remain. It’s not at all how jeffw described.
I just got yelled at because I can’t be Left wing unless I want to destroy capitalism? Which feels weird.
That’s a terminology issue that you’re going to run into in any sufficiently political community. ‘Left-wing’ in casual use in the US refers to “everyone except the Republicans and some moderates”, but “left-wing” in any serious political talk refers to anti-capitalism.
‘Left-wing’ in casual use in the US refers to “everyone except the Republicans and some moderates”, but “left-wing” in any serious political talk refers to anti-capitalism.
Please list the mainstream “leftist” parties in any G20 nation that are “anti-capitalist”; and by mainstream I mean they have more than two representatives at the federal level.
Mainstream leftist parties aren’t necessarily leftist, especially economically leftist. E.g. the Democratic party in the US.
are they really anti-capitalism?
or just calling for properly regulated capitalism?
According to capitalism, capitalism is the only regulation capitalism needs. Capitalism regulated by something other than capitalism is anti-capitalism.
The bigger issue is that so many people misconstrued capitalism and markets. They are two different things. You can have markets, well regulated markets. And not have capitalism. Even under authoritarian leninist governments they have markets. There were markets in Soviet russia, there are markets in-state capitalist China. Even in North korea. But they do not let the wealthy regulate and decide the markets as capitalism does. They have plenty of other issues however.
According to capitalism, capitalism is the only regulation capitalism needs. Capitalism regulated by something other than capitalism is anti-capitalism.
Respectfully, I don’t think this is true.
Even Adam Smith warned about the dangers of monopolies and the fact that businesses would try to crate them, collide againat consumers etc. That’s kind of the foundation of anti trust legislation.
Now, modern republicans have endorsed the view of capitalism that you’ve noted but to say that’s the how Capitalism works is like saying Soviet Russia is how communism works.
Respectfully, Adam Smith did not invent capitalism. He is seen by some as the father of it. But much like marx and Lenin and many others. Put together a popular outline of the thought at the time.
Even then he needs to be understood in the context of the times he lived in. He was very Progressive and educated for his time. But even if he believed that government should have some say in capitalism. Government back then meant wealthy white land owning males. I.E the capital class. I.E Capital controlling capital. Not the workers. Not women. Capitalism has always been about oligarchy. It was literally a response by the mercantilist class against the Royals.
Neither capitalism or socialism works for anyone but the vanguard/oligarchs.
You can’t just define capitalism however you want.
Most people understand that businesses need regulation, that’s the point and basis of so many agencies and bodies that it’s almost comical.
The real argument is how heavily it should be regulated. Yes, some folks, particularly those with a lot of capital don’t want regulations. That no more means capitalism itself doesn’t want or need regulations than say, a soccer player with a strong punch who wishes you could just punch other players means soccer wants players to be able to punch each other in the head.
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Properly regulated capitalism is my Left but…
Then you are technically left. Although leninists Will loudly denounce anyone who doesn’t follow their authoritarian ideology as being no true Scotsman.
Capitalism as I stated above is regulated by capital. Anything other than capital regulating capitalism is not capitalism. The whole point of capitalism is that Capital regulates itself. If you want something other than Capital regulating capitalism, i e the people or government. Then you are against Capital regulating itself. And therefore anti-capitalist.
The tricky bit is. That wealthy oligarchs have spent centuries at this point conflating markets and capitalism. They are two different things. Markets have existed for centuries, Millennium even. It’s one of man’s oldest inventions. Coming right about the same time as agriculture. Predating capitalism by thousands of years. Capitalism as a concept is barely older than the United States itself.
That’s a very absolutist view of the meaning of Capitalism.
With that view, how could anyone be against Capitalism then?
It’s technically never been tried with that definition.
It’s not absolutist. Mildly reductive perhaps. But not remotely absolutist.
How could anyone be for it? It’s literally rule by the wealthy. It was a response created by wealthy mercantilist. Frustrated that no matter how much money they had there was an echelon of power always denied to them.
It’s always been tried with that definition. At the founding of the United States, wealthy white land owning males. The capital class with all the capital controlled it. It was oligarchy from it’s establishment. It was more beneficial on average than mercantilism. But still a failure.
Even today in China. The vanguard, their capital controlling class controls and regulates their state capitalism. Capital regulates capitalism. Not the people.
I dobtwrhinj it’s any serious political talk (otherwise most countries are having unserious talks about their Left and Right wings) but maybe in serious political theory talks?
Like, Germany’s Left parties mostly don’t want to dismantle capitalism but I wouldn’t dismiss all conversation about them and putting people on that Left Right spectrum to be unserious.
Like, Germany’s Left parties mostly don’t want to dismantle capitalism but I wouldn’t dismiss all conversation about them and putting people on that Left Right spectrum to be unserious.
Even the SDP is pro-forma still for the abolition of capitalism.
I always thought they were more traditional socialist democracy?
But I doubt many of their voters believe a vote for them will bring about the end of capitalism…
That’s because for many of them it is easier to imagine the end of the world, than the end of capitalism.
I always thought they were more traditional socialist democracy?
… what do you think socialism is, exactly?
Generally, classically I’ve understood Socialism to still involve central planning of industry/production.
Whereas most modern socialist democracies tend to heavily regulate industry and enact social welfare programs to minimize the effects of different classes etc.
Generally, classically I’ve understood Socialism to still involve central planning of industry/production.
Socialism is worker control of the means of production, which can take many forms. What it is, most distinctively, is incompatible with capitalism, which is investor control of the means of production.
Whereas most modern socialist democracies tend to heavily regulate industry and enact social welfare programs to minimize the effects of different classes etc.
The most successful socialist parties in the West take the view that the harm of capitalism should be reduced while it still exists; they still believe in the eventual abolition of capitalism.
And the harm reduction comes in the form of removing parts of the economy from capitalist control, which is … anti-capitalist.
I don’t disagree but there is a distinct difference between social democracy and a socialist democracy, or democratic socialism.
The former is a capitalist system with some welfare systems in place, the latter is socialism without the one party state.
There is a lot of “Capitalist Realism” but the people in these parties that still consider themselves leftists usually do agree that capitalism should be abolished if pressed on the topic.
Although I’d agree that lemmygrad, lemmy.ml, and hexbear are far-left, with only one specifically right-wing instance that I can think of, I don’t think that most of the remaining Lemmy users on lemmy.world, lemmy.dbzer0.com, lemm.ee, beehaw.org, or any of the other big Lemmy instances are particularly extreme in their views.
On average, Lemmy users do seem to be more left-wing than right-wing, probably due to right-wing Redditors being less likely to mind Reddit’s monetization of its userbase, and more likely to mind Lemmy’s far-left instances.
While I don’t think Lemmy should encourage far-right users to join, given that racism and bigotry degrade any platform that allows such speech, I do think that those on the right who are not extreme and are capable of having thoughts independent of the MAGA cult should be welcomed on any instance, given that echo chambers only serve to propagate existing views, rather than foster discussion.
The key part in joining any instance are the instances that either block it or are blocked by it, so perhaps one that blocks lemmygrad, lemmy.ml, and hexbear by default, while minimizing the number of instances that in turn block it, would be optimal to have access to as many communities as possible.
Here’s a list of Lemmy instances by number of instances blocked and blocking, for reference. Seems to not be quite up-to-date, and can’t find the instance I’m on on the list, but it should still be somewhat helpful for comparing. Personally, I prefer being on an instance with as few blocks as possible (implementing those blocks instead on a user level as a means of curating my all feed), since the Lemmy community is already small enough as it is, but new users might not want to have to configure those blocks themselves.
I appreciate the well thought response. I habe quibbles but overall agree with you.
