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.
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.