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.
Not inherently, but I would argue that a minority viewpoint tolerating a contradictory mainstream view leaves it open to dilution, compromising its values.
Take /r/antiwork on reddit. How did it go from being radical anarchists against the concept of work as we know it, into a place where a founding moderator talking about those same beliefs in an interview makes their overwhelming majority feel embarrassed? A rapid rise in tolerated but unaligned newcomers progressively pushed the window of popular values away until the community’s stated values were undeniably compromised by the majority of users.
I do think that, similar to what you said, a big issue is a misconception that lemmy.ml is somehow the only instance or the official instance. It is annoying, especially when occasionally someone uses ‘Lemmy’ to refer to lemmy.ml.
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In the context of federated communities, I am not against such monolithic communities existing.
That doesn’t mean every community must be monolithic, or even should be monolithic! I’m actively involved in some communities that clearly benefit from not being monolithic, aiming to be those open societies that you referred to, because that’s aligned with their purpose. But for others, not being monolithic is anti-productive or even an existential threat for smaller platforms. This is especially relevant for niche communities that face outside attack or sudden infamy. If a platform is about a specific topic, and there are popular alternative places for people who won’t productively discuss that topic, I see no harm in omitting them from that group.
For some communities, like social groups, evolving makes sense and is compatible with its purpose for existence. However, if the direction of the community is driven suddenly by an influx of naive new users and the direction contradicts the sole purpose of the community, I fail to see how that’s not a harmful thing. It’s recuperation. If, for example, I start a small community of hundreds to discuss how society could benefit from not being designed around cars as a primary mode of transport, and it fosters constructive radical innovation on urban design principles that are valuable to society and case studies on how cities benefit or lose from redesigning transport, but then after making a news headline quickly becomes flooded by a few thousand naive progressives who soon shift the main topic of the community to be shallowly talking about news of cars becoming more ‘green’ and how to improve roads and cars and how electric cars are so much better for the environment than regular cars and dogpilling anyone who criticizes improvements in car design, then I see that as a travesty. There was a niche platform that enabled advanced, radical discussion without distraction, suddenly replaced by a pool of shallow circlejerking that, hooray, more people can feel welcome in, but now is nothing special or useful to society. That community didn’t evolve, it was replaced and removed. That is a loss to the greater open society that the focused community is a subset of. The open society thrives on diversity of opinion and allowing that diversity to foster into developed ideas instead of being smothered by the status quo.
Lemmy and lemmy.ml explicitly have different purposes. lemmy.ml’s purpose is not aligned with making every redditor feel welcome. Welcoming everyone would contradict its topic and hinder specialized discussion with distractions.
Lemmy, on the other hand, is more aligned with making every redditor feel welcome. It is the broader society that lemmy.ml is a subset of. I am not in favor of Lemmy being monolithic. I am in favor of lemmy.ml sticking to its broad but non-mainstream topic, and if you want to call that monolithic, then so be it.