as a person that came from the 3rd world country and new in fediverse environment, i genuinely would like to know about this.
edit: thanks for the replies! sorry, i literally don’t know the reason since i’m not a western lol. twitter/x is too biased especially when musk openly supports trump so i came here and seeing fediverse is mostly are harris or biden (when he’s still up for the candidate) supporters. don’t know about reddit tho, i only use reddit as a forum for linux and programming stuff.
I think a lot of the people on Lemmy came from Reddit when the whole API thing happened. It was pretty much a boycott. I assume most of the people who cared enough about that to leave were mostly left-leaning.
That’s why I’m here, at least.
Edit: not sure about Mastodon, though
Reddit chased away the Trump supporters before the API thing happened. When it did, some people like me who are classic-liberals and libertarians also came over. After all, Lemmy is an inherently libertarian platform even when its users aren’t. When I express a political opinion objectionable to leftists, I get several times more down-votes than up-votes but I do get up-votes.
I think this is an example of where the left-right axis isn’t the most adequate way of viewing things. The Fediverse in general is anti-authoritarian. You can be all the way from a far-left anarchist to a far-right anarcho-capitalist and still be anti-authoritarian, just like both tankies and nazis are authoritarian.
If it’s libertarian it’s libertarian socialist. There’s no property or capital on here, posts get boosted by collective voting, not based off your following or account. There’s not even an idea of karma, your account means basically nothing here. A capitalist libertarian social media would be something like nostr or what bluesky is claiming it’ll eventually do where you completely own your account and your following and you can use that social capital as you wish.
Lemmy is an inherently libertarian platform
This is an interesting perception, because if you mean American libertarianism then this doesn’t really make sense. Lemmy’s creators are communist and intended it to be anti-corporate. It is designed in a decentralized manner specifically to avoid situations where companies can own and profit from it.
The kinds of platforms I would see as being libertarian (in the American sense) are the diaspora of privately owned social media companies.
American libertarian just means embarrassed Republican nowadays.
The idea of federation isn’t communist
The idea of preventing private ownership and rent-seeking of communication platforms is.
Not all libertarian-leaning people are on board with corporatism; IMO freedom is for people, not businesses.
I respect it but if you’re American and trying to take the word back, I’m afraid you’re a little too late. It’s a political party now and they’re all-in on corporatism.
Lemmy is an inherently libertarian platform even when its users aren’t
The devs are Communists and created Lemmy along Communist lines and principles. Libertarians can also agree with Lemmy’s structure though.
There’s only one way you can support Trump today.
You either refuse to acknowledge all the terrible things he’s done, or you approve of the things he’s done.
People who refuse to acknowledge, are going to look at all the “fake news” on this site about His Oranginess, and quickly decide that it’s nothing but propaganda and go somewhere “more reliable”.
Those who agree, stick around a little longer. They will argue and defend the horrible things, because they think there are more like them that will come out and back them up as a fellow defender of
racismmisogynyhomophobia“Good old family values”. But they will be downvoted to oblivion and have trouble finding a friendly voice. Eventually, they too will go where they can have a more comfortable discussion with people who are as terrible as they are.And ironically enough, if you went to Truth Social, and asked why there weren’t more Biden/Harris supporters there, they’d give you the exact same answer in reverse.
We had an opportunity years ago to fix this problem. Long before Trump ever showed up on the scenes as a political individual. We needed in schools to be teaching how to pick out real news from fake news. How to pick out fact from propaganda. Hell out to read a newspaper properly.
How to logically pick a part in argument. We chose not to. We as a society, decided not to put our money towards that. Now people read a headline, and based purely on the headline, make a statement such as “throw the guy in jail for the rest of his life for that one “.
I sat on a jury trial. It was a murder trial, if you went purely by what was in the local newspaper, you would’ve seriously questioned why the guy didn’t just take a plea deal. If you sat in that courtroom day after day, listening to it you’d realize this is a lot tougher than what you realize. we had a hard time figuring out if the guy was even in town at the time of the murder.
But for those that weren’t involved in the trial, they’re convinced the guy belonged in jail for the rest of his life. Because people didn’t sit down and really read the newspaper and ask important questions. Because we don’t hold our journalists to a higher standard and force them to give all the information And tell both sides of the story.
I have no idea how you solve the problem anymore. Because at this point, even if you tell the complete truth about any given politician, no one‘s going to believe what they’re reading anymore because there’s another so-called journalist out there saying the exact opposite and people say well I don’t know what to believe then. And can’t figure out how to critically think about this and ask questions.
Here in Lemmy we are guilty of the same sort of thing, same as over at truth social same as over at Twitter same as over Facebook.
As a society, I’m sorry for the language here, we are well and truly fucked.
I truly don’t know what the answer is.
Also sidenote 10 bucks says somebody comes back with a stupid comment of well since you don’t know what the answer is obviously you’re just saying that we shouldn’t do anything and just give up.
You haven’t seen any of the “genocide Joe” trolls?
They’ve all but vanished after Biden dropped out of the race.
you’ve stopped seeing comments about Biden once he became irrelevant?
Shh stop pointing out basic reality to liberals, they’ll get scared and start sending you death threats
Lemmy is full of communists/socialists - this is an opposite side of political spectrum
Lemmy is full of communists/socialists
Socialist here! Lemmy is much more welcoming than Reddit.
Why join Lemmy.world as a Socialist? There’s a lot less Socialist content to interact with that way
Well I didn’t join Lemmy just to do Socialist stuff. I just happen to be a socialist, and I joined Lemmy. What instance to you recommend?
The 3 biggest Socialist-friendly instances are Lemmy.ml (FOSS and Privacy focused but maintained by Communists), and the 2 dedicated Communist instances, Lemmygrad.ml and Hexbear.net.
If you want to see as much content as possible, liberal or otherwise, Lemmy.ml will let you see it. Lemmy.ml doesn’t block Hexbear or Lemmygrad, so you can interact with those communities while retaining access to Lemmy.ca and Lemmy.world.
If you are a dedicated Marxist-Leninist, Lemmygrad takes itself “seriously,” though it’s the smallest of the 3.
If you’re generally a Socialist, Hexbear is a Left-Unity instance made up of Communists and Anarchists, is by far the most active leftist instance, and also the most self-sustainable thanks to its large and active userbase. Plus, it’s less serious.
TL;DR based on what you’ve said, either Lemmy.ml or Hexbear.net, the former if you want to retain access to Lemmy.ca and Lemmy.world while gaining access to Hexbear and Lemmygrad, the latter if you want a much more active community than Lemmy.ml federated with most instances, with the exclusion of Lemmy.world and Lemmy.ca
Thank you! This is great information!
