edit: having a community dedicated to letists only can be a bad idea in that it can make sure your beliefs are not questioned. I have thought myself as a socialist and I have thought myself as a anarcho-capitalist, I don’t believe in either anymore. I think if radical views go unchecked they might cause problems. Although I am a capitalist now, being confronted by socialists has made me aware of capitalisms deep flaws. When I considered myself a communist (17 year old me) I thought opposing views really changed my mind. So that’s the ideologically diversity I am talking about.
I love the outlook of lemmy, I think the design is decent and simplistic. But one thing I can’t seem to get over is the fact that almost everyone here seem to think the same politically. Why do you guys think this is?? I know this is a community of leftists foss enthusiasts but I hope everyone here is aware that it is driving many people away from adapting it.
Sounds like more of a general problem than a Lemmy problem.
Different instances leaning into different thoughts seems like exactly what you’d want. After alll, the ‘echo chamber’ is really a pejorative name for a community (or at least a necessary aspect of a community).
I don’t think there are Left or Right wing ideologies - the entire idea’s nonsense, but I’ve not found problems on the instance due to being insufficiently Left wing.
The left-right spectrum is obsolete, harmful, absolute nonsense, yes. As for problems on the instance over ‘insufficient left wing’, it did have more impacts when instances like Wolfballs federated with here (de-facto ‘right’ American Libertarianism instance) and I have seen bans (mostly from single communities but occasionally global) from a couple of accounts posting repetitively about pro-NATO topics wrt Ukraine in news communities. Overall, it doesn’t seem to be a big issue here but I think that’s partly due to the community not pushing those boundaries much.
Ultimately, Lemmy is a Reddit clone and one problem with Reddit-like platforms is the upvote/downvote system heavily promotes groupthink since dissenting opinions are downvoted into oblivion while consensus opinions are promoted. Lemmy attempts to solve this problem by being open source, self-hostable, and federated (which are all great things), but these aspects alone can’t totally solve the inherent groupthink problem, it just makes it easier for those with differing views to spin off and start their own instances, which will likely have their own groupthink.
As politically centrist myself, I’ve basically just unsubscribed from the political communities and focus on the more tech-related ones. If an apolitical or more centrist political Lemmy instance which federated with lemmy.ml was started there’s a good chance I’d join.
It’s an interesting point, but what’s the alternative? Activity-based ranking like forums and imageboards might be appealing, although it is worth acknowledging they naturally bias towards controversy, for better or worse. Probably worse for a ‘centrist’, which is a relative non-term but I assume it means pro-status quo liberalism who doesn’t like radical ideas.
You can actually set that up on Lemmy’s front page (not comments) by using that New Comment sorting, but that’s not a default anywhere so its not relevant unless an instance chooses it as a default.
Anyway, groupthink is an interesting problem in the case of recuperation and ‘sanewashing’ of ideas. reddit’s /r/antiwork is a prime example: it was initially anarchists who wanted to abolish the concept of work (not necessarily labor) as we know it, but it became popular and reddit’s pro-capitalism pro-liberal groupthink got to the point where their founding(?) moderator’s views, congruent with the resources in the sidebar, caused massive outrage. Like you said, dissent and discussion is overwhelmed by funny memes and fulfilling anecdotes.
I agree that pointing out the problem is far easier than finding a good solution. I don’t think activity-based sorting is much better since, as you said, that just tends to promote the most outrageous content. Facebook and Twitter-like platforms suffer from that issue more than Reddit-like platforms do. In short, I don’t have a good solution and I acknowledge the benefits of the upvote/downvote system (such as outrageous and irrelevant content being filtered out by the community without the need for as much active moderation), but it is a poor tool for fostering civil, ideologically diverse communities.
Lemmy is a federated network. The idea with federation is that you’re supposed to join or create an instance that fits your idea of “best instance”. If you dislike the fact that lemmy.ml is an instance for “leftist privacy and FOSS enthusiasts” you should look for another instance that in your opinion is better.
Note that this doesn’t necessarily isolate people with different views (creating an “echo-chamber”), because different instances can still communicate with each other if those instances aren’t blocking the other ones. If you check the “All” tab on the instance’s main page, you can see content posted on other instances too. This page shows how lemmy.ml is connected with other instances: https://lemmy.ml/instances
I don’t want more right wingers to join because I don’t think they have much useful things to say (I think this as a former right winger) but I do think there is diversity beyond the left and right spectrum that would help lemmy some.
There’s not a lot of women here. There’s not much stuff related to hobbies outside of tech. Politics is heavily driven by the ML context of the broader lemmy community. I’d love to see some discussions of social democratic policy stuff, not because I think it’s better but because there’s only so many times you can listen to people rehash Das kapital in the comments. What about some MMT stuff? What about liquid democracy or people experimenting with holocracy etc?
Politics is heavily driven by the ML context of the broader lemmy community
Well that would make sense, a lot of the crackdowns on reddit have been happening on ML subs since the broader online left tends to be hostile towards us.
I’m going to paste my comment from a similar topic:
I find that conversation flourishes when you limit it to a certain degree. In spaces which are completely open and have a massive range of opinion, what you’ll find is mostly yelling at each other over broad talking points that everyone is already familiar with. After a while, nothing of interest comes out of the far left clashing with the far right all the time. But when you limit it, time can be spent doing other things than yelling at the dickhead on the other side who you have little to no overlap with and see as a dire enemy. You can talk about nuances in principles, differences in organizing, etc. It makes for richer, more interesting conversation.
There’s also quite a huge range within the umbrella of leftism, and honestly we already have a huge enough gap there that there’s a lot of worthless clashing. Broadening that would only make the site worse.
I think the problem is that there does need to be a certain amount of anti-establishment to even be interested in a place like Lemmy, there don’t tend to be a lot of anti establishment centrists (those who call themselves as such are for the most party just rightwingers).
While I do agree that ideological diversity is good, one does need to be careful when trying to enact it because you might end up with a place like r/polititicalcompassmemes (though that particular cesspit is probably a different thing entirely).
The main issue when it comes to spreading FOSS alternatives to big tech is that how interesting a social media space is is almost directly related to how much activity there is on it, to be frank there really isn’t much going on here. How we get people to show up and adapt it for themselves is that we ourselves be more engaged in it and spread the word elsewhere off-site
I understand what you are saying. Echo Chambers are absolutely dangerous.
People need to be exposed to views that don’t necessarily align with theirs. That way they can expand their viewpoint.
Having said that, this is just one site among many. Not every website has to hold multiple views. Taking the internet as a whole, there are a variety of websites that people can get differing opinions and viewpoints.
Now that I think about it, it sounds good in theory but I know many far-right people that don’t attempt to look for alternative sources. They just keep delving down the same Rabbit Hole instead of looking for differing views. So you might be on to something.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !asklemmy@lemmy.ml
A loosely moderated place to ask open ended questions
If your post is
Open ended
Not offensive
Not regarding lemmy support (c/lemmy_support)
not ad nauseam inducing (please make sure its a question that would be new to most members)
>ideologically diverseSmells like centrism
are you still arguing here it has been months
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Sounds like more of a general problem than a Lemmy problem.
Different instances leaning into different thoughts seems like exactly what you’d want. After alll, the ‘echo chamber’ is really a pejorative name for a community (or at least a necessary aspect of a community).
I don’t think there are Left or Right wing ideologies - the entire idea’s nonsense, but I’ve not found problems on the instance due to being insufficiently Left wing.
The left-right spectrum is obsolete, harmful, absolute nonsense, yes. As for problems on the instance over ‘insufficient left wing’, it did have more impacts when instances like Wolfballs federated with here (de-facto ‘right’ American Libertarianism instance) and I have seen bans (mostly from single communities but occasionally global) from a couple of accounts posting repetitively about pro-NATO topics wrt Ukraine in news communities. Overall, it doesn’t seem to be a big issue here but I think that’s partly due to the community not pushing those boundaries much.
Ultimately, Lemmy is a Reddit clone and one problem with Reddit-like platforms is the upvote/downvote system heavily promotes groupthink since dissenting opinions are downvoted into oblivion while consensus opinions are promoted. Lemmy attempts to solve this problem by being open source, self-hostable, and federated (which are all great things), but these aspects alone can’t totally solve the inherent groupthink problem, it just makes it easier for those with differing views to spin off and start their own instances, which will likely have their own groupthink.
As politically centrist myself, I’ve basically just unsubscribed from the political communities and focus on the more tech-related ones. If an apolitical or more centrist political Lemmy instance which federated with lemmy.ml was started there’s a good chance I’d join.
It’s an interesting point, but what’s the alternative? Activity-based ranking like forums and imageboards might be appealing, although it is worth acknowledging they naturally bias towards controversy, for better or worse. Probably worse for a ‘centrist’, which is a relative non-term but I assume it means pro-status quo liberalism who doesn’t like radical ideas.
You can actually set that up on Lemmy’s front page (not comments) by using that New Comment sorting, but that’s not a default anywhere so its not relevant unless an instance chooses it as a default.
Anyway, groupthink is an interesting problem in the case of recuperation and ‘sanewashing’ of ideas. reddit’s /r/antiwork is a prime example: it was initially anarchists who wanted to abolish the concept of work (not necessarily labor) as we know it, but it became popular and reddit’s pro-capitalism pro-liberal groupthink got to the point where their founding(?) moderator’s views, congruent with the resources in the sidebar, caused massive outrage. Like you said, dissent and discussion is overwhelmed by funny memes and fulfilling anecdotes.
I agree that pointing out the problem is far easier than finding a good solution. I don’t think activity-based sorting is much better since, as you said, that just tends to promote the most outrageous content. Facebook and Twitter-like platforms suffer from that issue more than Reddit-like platforms do. In short, I don’t have a good solution and I acknowledge the benefits of the upvote/downvote system (such as outrageous and irrelevant content being filtered out by the community without the need for as much active moderation), but it is a poor tool for fostering civil, ideologically diverse communities.
Same. I thought to myself there are better things than politics to focus on. But yes, groupthink is a problem with such platforms.
Fools attract fools. Intelligent attract intelligent.
Lemmy is a federated network. The idea with federation is that you’re supposed to join or create an instance that fits your idea of “best instance”. If you dislike the fact that lemmy.ml is an instance for “leftist privacy and FOSS enthusiasts” you should look for another instance that in your opinion is better.
Note that this doesn’t necessarily isolate people with different views (creating an “echo-chamber”), because different instances can still communicate with each other if those instances aren’t blocking the other ones. If you check the “All” tab on the instance’s main page, you can see content posted on other instances too. This page shows how lemmy.ml is connected with other instances: https://lemmy.ml/instances
This site offers a graphical representation of the lemmy federation: https://lemmymap.feddit.de/
Oh, you’re a capitalist? Show me your vast swaths of capital then
Do you have a warrant? :')
this instance may not be, but the fediverse is. that’s kinda the whole point.
I don’t want more right wingers to join because I don’t think they have much useful things to say (I think this as a former right winger) but I do think there is diversity beyond the left and right spectrum that would help lemmy some.
There’s not a lot of women here. There’s not much stuff related to hobbies outside of tech. Politics is heavily driven by the ML context of the broader lemmy community. I’d love to see some discussions of social democratic policy stuff, not because I think it’s better but because there’s only so many times you can listen to people rehash Das kapital in the comments. What about some MMT stuff? What about liquid democracy or people experimenting with holocracy etc?
I think there’s more women on the lemmygrad instance, at least in my experience.
I’m going to paste my comment from a similar topic:
There’s also quite a huge range within the umbrella of leftism, and honestly we already have a huge enough gap there that there’s a lot of worthless clashing. Broadening that would only make the site worse.
I think the problem is that there does need to be a certain amount of anti-establishment to even be interested in a place like Lemmy, there don’t tend to be a lot of anti establishment centrists (those who call themselves as such are for the most party just rightwingers).
While I do agree that ideological diversity is good, one does need to be careful when trying to enact it because you might end up with a place like r/polititicalcompassmemes (though that particular cesspit is probably a different thing entirely).
The main issue when it comes to spreading FOSS alternatives to big tech is that how interesting a social media space is is almost directly related to how much activity there is on it, to be frank there really isn’t much going on here. How we get people to show up and adapt it for themselves is that we ourselves be more engaged in it and spread the word elsewhere off-site
Because capitalism and other liberal ideologies are inherently exploitative.
I understand what you are saying. Echo Chambers are absolutely dangerous.
People need to be exposed to views that don’t necessarily align with theirs. That way they can expand their viewpoint.
Having said that, this is just one site among many. Not every website has to hold multiple views. Taking the internet as a whole, there are a variety of websites that people can get differing opinions and viewpoints.
Now that I think about it, it sounds good in theory but I know many far-right people that don’t attempt to look for alternative sources. They just keep delving down the same Rabbit Hole instead of looking for differing views. So you might be on to something.