Why is the solarpunk memes community on this instance filled with such massively anti-left folks?
That’s what happens when people interact with a movement based on aesthetics and little else.
See also: Nazi Punks (Fuck Off)
It’s one of the more popular communities on the instance, and has a lot of subscribers from other instances, which brings with it a range of political opinions. As long as those opinions aren’t breaking the instance rules, moderation of our communities is at the moderator’s discretion.
If I had to wager a guess, it likely more of a backlash against .ml and hexbear more than anything, which are unfortunately the main ambassadors of “leftist” ideology on the fediverse. These instances legitimately make leftists look bad, to the point where it actually feels like it has come all the way back around as self parody.
Legit, hexbear feels like a goddamn 4chan psyop
It is. A big tell is their vernacular. It’s not leftists. It’s someone else pretending to be.
Another one is their interests or hobbies. They do not talk about these topics the same way the people they pretend to be because they are not the people they pretend to be.
I’ve been chronically online enough to be able to get a sense of it. They often slip. Some times it’s so obvious it’s a kid who is trying to copy the more adept ones.
A lot of minority subreddits on reddit are so fake too. It’s 21st century blackface minstrel shows. Easy to dupe casual users. If you’re chronically online long enough you can tell.
ETA: This is conspiratorial as the people who get caught all the time forgetting to switch their alt accounts. Can’t reply to the mod for some reason so I guess I’m done here.
Idk man, i spend a lot of time on tumblr and have for years - and some people have spent so long in the performative space that they’re actually that bad. Arguably they’re not actual leftists, just (badly) aping the behaviour they think is required for approval, but that’s still different from malicious intent
They don’t hide it on their own boards. The right wing spaces. It’s a real thing they do.
The two things we’re talking about are not mutually exclusive. There are people who spent too much time in those “performative space”. They get incited by agitators too. It’s a clusterfuck.
There is no evidence for this and !anarchism@slrpnk.net is not the space for conspiracies like this.
I’d argue Lemmygrad is worse than .ml
.ml has people on it that aren’t into politics or that discuss other things, due to having been the largest instance when the Reddit api fiasco happened. Many people choose to stay there simply out of laziness or reasons other than ideology.
Lemmygrad and Hexbear are, on the other hand, explicitly political and have certain ideologies as themes which inherently create conflict/discourse with people of other ideologies.
On that note, is slrpnk open registration now? It wasn’t when I joined Lemmy, .ml was the only one I could join at that time.
We focus on quality over quantity, so membership on SLRPNK requires you answer questions and wait for your application to be reviewed by a human. I don’t know how you define open registration, but that’s been our policy for over a year now.
Oh, that’s cool! I think they were fully closed when I tried to join due to the huge influx of users, but it’s a very fair method of admitting new users then!
On that note, is slrpnk open registration now? It wasn’t when I joined Lemmy, .ml was the only one I could join at that time.
As far as I know it is
Good point!
Hexbear is good and most of the negative things people have to say about it are completely made up
It’s super rare to have a pleasant interaction with hexbear users. And I think thats something they are proud of. To me this just really sad, because how exactly are you spreading your propaganda effectively when everyone just thinks you are annoying?
Also on hexbear users of other instances or other instances as a whole get heavily misrepresented and there seems to be no good faith when interacting with other communities that are not closely aligned in their political stance. (Of course hexbear itself also suffers from lots of misrepresentation, which probably contributes a lot to their in group / out group thinking)
Hexbears don’t really make any attempt to hide the fact that they love trolling and brigading. Even the places where I align with their general ideology, I find them pretty obnoxious and juvenile. Contrary to the other user, I actually struggle to imagine how anyone who has spent any time around them could not find them annoying. The emoji spam alone is pretty cringe, and that’s before you even get to the weird dunning Kruger thing they have going on with their politics.
it’s super rare to have a pleasant interaction with hexbear users.
In my experience that is because it’s super rare for liberals to approach socialists in good faith. They don’t pleasantly interact with bad faith trolls, with transphobes, with homophobes, with racists, with misogynists, with fascists, and so on. If you were to approach them in good faith you would find nothing but pleasant interaction.
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If you think that’s bad try posting on the vegan community 😆
So many lefties are pro-liberation until animal liberation comes up. Then, they immediately turn into reactionaries.
Noice.
Freedom for me but not for thee!
Solarpunk memes gets a lot of users from other instances, which can see populare posts. Lemmy as a whole is fairly small and pretty much all the post in that communtiy have gone viral to an extend. Many might not realize the community they are posting in is solarpunk. That being said lemmy as a whole is fairly left. Most comments are at worsed neoliberal, which is in our world unfortunatly centrists.
At the same time I just looked at your comments. When you argue the matter and not the person, you got nearly no downvotes. Calling people a child got you a ton of them. You litterally insulted the person you replied to and well when you act like an asshole, you get treated like one. When you started actually argueing your point in a calm manner, you neither got the downvotes nor the insulting replies. I loose my calm too, which sucks, but hey that is being human. Generally speaking when you argue in private insulting the other person is a really bad idea. The general reponse is “you too” and closing off to the arguement and they end up trying to beat you. That kind of pissing contest is just bad for your mental health too and well the other person might be right. I certainly have changed my mind on things.
Your first paragraph is insightful.
Second, I don’t agree with obviously. First of all I had no intention to even insult the other user, to me it was just pointing out that the person suggested they weren’t renting yet, so the natural assumption is it’s some teenager living with their parents. Hence the “are you a child”
But even if I did, the “you get nearly no downvotes arguing calmly” thing is extremely naive. We have the past decade of western culture war backlash to social justice that shows that rhetoric lives or dies by the dunk.
A good dunk will give the onlookers a giggle, a bit of dopamine and a good association. The point of an internet debate isn’t to convince an opponent, it’s to demonstrate how the opponent is a stupid idiot head so that onlookers don’t feel inclined to agree with them free from the shame of a long drawn out internet holy war, with interaction boiled down to “agree” and “disagree” buttons.
This doesn’t always work ofc, the audience has to be receptive first, and most people’s political opinions are pre-determined, but there’s some space in the middle up for grabs, whether calm or not if people are receptive, it will get upvotes, and if it’s a nice charismatic dunk it will get even more upvotes.
All that it shows is what you’ve said in the first half of your comment - the audience is already pre-determined against critiques of the internal issues if the west.
Just examine that one comment I made where it’s coated in pro-western boastful motivational positive language, it’s a simple matter of which aesthetics appeal.
In that case, I am worried that you seem to believe the average leftist is some kid sitting in the basement of his parents and blaiming capitalism for not getting laid.
What makes you say that at all? Those in fact seemed to be the accusations of other posters in the thread towards the OOP, rather than me who was defending them?
That you try to copy the social justice backlash. That was the main target group and trying to dunk the other site in a “Upvote” “Downvote” holy war sounds like that too.
People are people, they all love a good dunk, its about us being social animals first and foremost. IMO, Its all about optics to 99% of people. It’s also where satire derives it’s power, this is a more toxic nastier version of that, fit for the 21st century online discourse.
Just look at US elections right now as another example. Kamala doesn’t have some sort of hugely popular policy, she is simply good at dunking, as a result Trump’s optics have been utterly shattered.
The anti-left sentiment is coming primarily from outside slrpnk. Solarpunk memes is the most popular community on the instance, giving it broad reach, and lemmy is broadly liberal with a few leftist sanctuaries (the most extreme of which are defederated from the liberal instances).
The way I see it, we have a couple options. Either we can go the way of lemmy.ml or hexbear and heavily censor liberals, creating constant inter-instance drama and likely ending up defederated, or we can accept that our most popular communities will be full of liberals in the comments and treat them as a form of outreach.
I prefer the second option. For one, even though the comments are full of liberals, the posts themselves are overwhelmingly leftist, which means a lot of liberals are being exposed to leftist views. They will reject it most of the time - as most people do when confronted with views that conflict with their own - but sometimes something might stick, and that’s a good thing. Also we have our smaller and more niche communities to hang out in if you want to avoid the liberals.
I would like to hear @poVoq@slrpnk.net chime in on this, as they will be the one to ultimately decide the direction of the instance.
We as admins obviously have some red lines, but overall as @ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net has already commented in this thread it is up to the community moderators to steer the individual community’s direction.
Overall I agree with the outreach notion, but I did notice an increase in relatively low effort liberal rage-bait “memes” being posted in our /c/memes community with predictable results in the comments (including right-wing trolling to fan the flames). I don’t think those specific memes are particularly effective as outreach tools, so it would be probably beneficial to do a bit more early moderation on that part.
Agreed, not censoring is the right call, I was just curious why that community specifically.
5/10 of the posts of this week are explicitly leftist.
3 are about green politics.
The final 2 are about soil science and wasps.
I see very few right-wing posts there.
Posts - sure. Comments? Not so much. https://slrpnk.net/post/12509233
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Good point. Damn.
If that dumbass ragebait meme is an accurate representation of left-wing beliefs then you guys are delusional and shouldn’t be the least bit surprised when people mock you for it
Average sh.itjust.works poster
I’m pretty sure the meme is just a hyperbolic, funny, critique of some undemocratic features of western democracies. It’s not trying to suggest equivalence or invite comparison to third world autocracies or describe in depth the critiques of the world from a leftist point of view. In that sense it rings true.
Does my instance have a crappy reputation?
Yup. I see neoliberal takes ALL THE TIME on that instance, especially likely to jump down your throat if you want to be intellectually honest about the true nature of the hyper-materialistic, corporatist Democrat establishment in the US.
Slrpnk and lemmy in general is just a bunch of yuppies.
👏Fucking exactly.
Using the right pronouns to describe the homeless family that they stepped over on their way to the ATM.
Lemmy.world users: “I’m all for equal rights except when it comes to poor people or people being blown to bits by the missiles that pay for my 401K.”
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