I can’t really think of a reason for that as Reddit is hated somewhat equally by “both” sides of the spectrum. It’s just something I find interesting.
Not really meaning for this to sound as arrogant as it’s going to, but… Lemmy is almost entirely populated by nerds so far.
Nerds tend to be open to tech, maybe a little smarter overall. You know? You can tell by the grammar, the spelling. It’s a different group here.
Reality is left leaning, and the stupider someone is, in general, the more likely they are to lean right politically. The rest of the right are the really rich, who tend to be up the psychological spectrum toward sociopathic, so of course they would have no time for caring for others’ needs.
Reality is left leaning…
It really is. So much of conservatism involves pissing into the wind, and trying to argue against objective truth.
Reality is left leaning
I know this was a joke Colbert made, but the truth is the reverse: the left is reality-leaning. It’s truly terrifying to see how divorced from reality the right-wing is, and how gleefully they just keep storming in that direction.
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Are those groups right wing, or just centrists that don’t react well to people trying to push far left ideals in their spaces?
Just very, very rightist.
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It’s not the tech nerds funding the right wing; it’s the venture capitalists
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Those are CEOs.
There’s a huge contingent of socialist/leftist techies. How do you think the open source movement happened? The most popular operating system for both servers and smartphones is given away to the world by a .org
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I’m not saying there are no right-wing tech nerds, I’m saying that your argument that tech nerds are right wing is overly reductive.
You concede my point about FOSS but then try to muddy the waters from there by citing “their platforms started getting cracked down on and [their having] adopted cryptocurrency” to try to make your prior pidgeon-holing still work. Mind citing me a source for either of those claims? Neither of those seem to me to be issues plaguing the wider FOSS community, and as a participant I’m interested to hear about this news I’ve apparently missed.
Silicon Valley is not representative of tech nerds in general. It is, like Hollywood, a small area filled with desperate people trying to turn their talents into fame and fortune. Insinuating that tech nerds in general have the same culture as Silicon Valley is like insinuating that actors in general dress, act, and think like Hollywood actors do. It’s ridiculous on its face.
All this to say it really sounds like you’ve built up a stereotype based on what you read in the news rather than by engaging with the actual community in question.
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Silicon Valley is notorious for right-wingers
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I wouldn’t call them nerds because they’re venture capitalists not nerds. Nerds implies some sort of technological or engineering skill or ability. Steve Jobs would qualify; not these two.
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Perfectly summed up.
Your username/instance combo is amazing. 10/10
lol, thanks
That instance is epic lol .uk
The super rich are usually highly educated but they live in such a homogenous bubble that they’re opinions on the majority of society should be entirely discounted. They usually have a total lack of empathy for people and vote for politicians with the same attitude. I have met some super rich people who try very hard to go against the grain and not fall into that mindset, but something about the need for protecting your money and lifestyle usually promotes an untrustworthy and skeptical view of everyone in their lives including their own family.
“tens”
“You can tell by the grammar, the spelling”
The political vibe on Lemmy isn’t really a new thing. Reddit had it 15 years ago. Good forums and IRC channels had it before that. It’s been part of the “golden age” of every online social medium
Eventually, teenage edgelords find start taking up too much space. Shortly after that, the far-right turn up to prey on them.
The people who made the platform good in the first place leave and the cycle begins anew.
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Theres a difference. While nerds are often book smart, we often have social difficulties.
To an extent. But whenever there is a political discussion on Hacker News, the lib right response is very, very loud, and I try to remind myself I appreciate Hacker News for its tech news.
I think the culture is just different. Lemmy was started and run by Tankies. Hacker News was started by Y Combinator, which incubates silicon valley startups. They’re going to attract different audiences, or at least different groups of people who will put up with different politics. I can’t claim to be particularly upset about the .ml domains being pulled and the center mass of Lemmy moving away from those instances.
What’s a tankie? I keep seeing it.
I had to look it up too. Apparently it’s an authoritarian leftist. Thinks state-socialism was a good thing. As while most leftists are more of the democratic, market, and anarchist varieties.
State socialism is a good thing, what tankies promote is something else, they’re fascist that can’t accept that fact because it would mean having something in common with the fascists in the USA, a country that they hate so much that they’re ready to deny reality to have an anti USA opinion.
They’re authoritarian. Not fascist. There is a difference. Even if both groups are more dedicated to authoritarianism than anything else. I would not be caught dead voluntarily anywhere with a fascist. While I disagree heavily with ML communist I might associate with them a little bit. But just never give them power.
I’m confused, and you seem to be a lot more familiar with the term. I read the wiki link that explains tankies. I don’t personally know any left leaning people who support Russia/Stalin/China regimes. Maybe because of my America-centric viewpoint and where things are today, but typically people who are economically left are also socially and politically left (equal opportunity is more important than individual freedoms), which is very anti-fascist. I’ve heard people say how great a true communism could be if it were possible, but no one’s ever made it past a dictatorship to get there.
Are tankies people who are economically left but socially and politically right, and think someone has achieved a communist utopia without knowing anything about the corrupt oligarchies in Russia or CCP China?
The confusion comes from so much mass media that equates socialism with communism. They’re orthogonal concepts! Saying socialism is the same as communism is like saying beer-making is exactly the same as cheese-making. Anyone who understands what beer and cheese are would be like, “I’m sorry, what‽”
The best way to think of socialism is that’s it’s a governance strategy that can be used wherever you want. Want everyone to pay taxes in order to fund and deliver government-run firefighting services? That’s socialism. Want to do the same with the military? Socialism. Whenever the government is delivering some good or service by way of taxpayer dollars that’s socialism.
Capitalism and communism are economic systems. You can have socialist government constructs under either capitalism or communism. It’s just that communism doesn’t really have the flexibility to provide goods or services in any other way than via the government.
Then there’s countries like China that claim to be communist (and the Right loves to call them that) but really, they’re more capitalist than communist. What they do have that most communists and fascist governments have is authoritarianism.
That authoritarianism is what fascists and “tankies” have in common: Fascists support an authoritarian, pseudo-capitalist government while “tankies” support an authoritarian, pseudo-communist government.
I appreciate your break down on this, I feel like I get so confused with auth/fasc terms
The problem is not state socialism, it’s the authoritarian side of it. Tankies promote authoritarian views similar to fascists but with a different economics view (not even that different some times), hence they prefer the dictatorships like USSR (in these days even Putin, which is idiotic), North Korea, China; over what they perceive as imperialist, the USA (I agree on calling it imperialistic and disliking it, but not on considering it worse than dictatorships).
I’m a communist which likes state socialism, but what is and was present in those dictatorship (ignoring the authoritarian side which I despise) is state capitalism.
The problem is not state socialism, it’s the authoritarian side of it
The communist utopia needs authoritarianism to work
Thanks for not leaving out the anarchists
Let me Google that for you.
I gotcha
Thanks! I thought it was Lemmy specific slang.
People who cheer when others point out flaws in USA but start screaming when flaws in Russia or China are pointed out.
Basically authoritarian leftists that are caricaturized as worshipping the Soviet Union
Thinks Stalin was cool and Lenin was correct to break the short lived democracy of the USSR. The rest is details.
Lol! I am totally a nerd
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I once got dogpiled in r/lsd of all places for saying employers shouldn’t be allowed to drug test for thc. I got swarmed for “being a druggie” in a sub about lsd.
I quit reddit for good not too long after that. What a fucking shithole.
There’s been tons of right-leaning Reddit alternatives before, but they always quickly devolved into Nazi spaces.
Lemmy was the first one that I’m aware of, which told Nazis to fuck off right from the beginning.
That’s the important bit. The creators of Lemmy needed to be hard leftist to keep it from being taken over by right wingers before it could become popular. Now it’s big enough that the community isn’t as leftist as the creators, but will still reject turning into another voat.
They just have their own instance and are defederated by some but not all, which is the best solution as it means they stick to their part of the fediverse instead of hijacking subs that weren’t right leaning in the first place.
Yeah, right-wingers flock to “safe-spaces” as much as the far-left does. Lemmy doesn’t have the tools to make a single community isolated like they could on Reddit, so they have to go to their own instances and end up defederated.
The main differences between left-wing and right-wing communities is that the right-wing ones quickly deteriorate towards a lot of hate related things. This leads them to being isolated from the rest. The left wingers are mostly tolerable and are just over zealous in preaching things like forcing everyone to use pronouns, lmao.
And everybody wins!
I’m sorry but what is considered to be “Nazi” in this platform? I’ve seen even socialists being called Nazis
I’ve never had a productive conversation that started with “please define what counts as a Nazi for me”.
I do not speak for this platform, but what I mean with Nazis here, are people who support the exclusion, inhumane treatment or exploitation of arbitrary groups of people, generally for the Nazi’s (perceived) benefit and in spite of basic morals.
And what would exclusion, inhumane treatment and exploitation mean? It’s key to clearly define the concepts before applying the label to someone, as if they stay undefined everyone can have the label applied
Right, so another policy from the early days of Lemmy that I thought was quite vital: No endless discussions on what precisely constitutes Nazi behaviour.
It’s truly not hard to not be a Nazi. And if someone is even roughly in the ballpark of being a Nazi, the community as a whole just doesn’t care to have that person’s input here.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that I do not think, it’s relevant to clearly define these terms.
Then it’s easy to fall to “Nazi is when I don’t like”
If you’re worried people will think you’re a Nazi, maybe it’s not the other people you should be worried about.
What if you just have no idea of what my views are and I hate Nazis probably as much if not more as you do?
Unfettered echo chamber of right wing ideals will always devolve into fascist authoritarian and nazism
Surprise surprise, echo chambers devolve into more extreme versions of the original views
That’s literally just how echo works
wweeew replies to absolutely nothing?
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I don’t mind. Fewer conservatives means higher quality and higher general IQ.
Doesn’t that make it an eChO cHaMbEr or something(?) Like, I don’t mind people I disagree with being within the same community I frequent, I just disagree within good boy guidelines. :)
I’ll quote Drew Curtis of fark.com fame:
“Reality has a liberal bias.”
Didn’t Stephen Colbert coin that phrase? I thought he said it at the White House Correspondence Dinner or something.
Could be. Drew has also said it, that’s where I first heard it so that’s where I’ve attributed it.
I say this as a fan of Colbert.
Isn’t Drew a conservative?
In the grand scheme of things, both major US partys still primary subscribe to some version of liberalism at their core, although that’s changing on both fronts.
People need to realize that in a world wide perspective, liberals are considered right wing for being capitalist. They’re only left wing in the fucked up US political landscape that is so far skewed right.
That’s disappointing if true. I loved Fark back in the day!
Looks like I’m behind the times. I checked his wikipedia page because I remembered he ran for Governor of Kentucky, but the page didn’t list his political affiliation in that race. But in 2019, he ran for State Auditor as a Democrat. So perhaps he isn’t!
Forget lemmy. Let’s all go hang out at Fark again.
Eh…
¯\_ (ツ) _/¯
When discussing the whole space of possible political views, there is no “both sides”. There are seven zillion different axes on seven zillion different issues, some of them concrete (“should we forbid chemical companies from manufacturing neonicotinoid pesticides?”) and some abstract (“what is the best relationship between individual creativity, the marketplace, and the state?”).
“Both sides” (polarized duality) is partly an artifact of specific electoral systems. It can lead to people shooting at each other over tiny differences in doctrine — or, even more often, over which leader to follow this year.
Also: for example both US parties would be considered as a (far) right party here in Germany
Nah, one center-right (formerly centrist) and one far-right (formerly center-right). See discussion here and here.
In gist:
The Democrats have become the party of international free-trade capitalism with appropriate regulation, and with international policies that represent loyalty to the nation’s traditional alliances.
The Republicans have become the local representative of the international far-right: the Putin-Trump-Erdogan-Orban-Netanyahu-etc. axis, focused on granting strongman leaders the ability to loot their states, purge opposition even among the elite (see DeSantis-Disney), betray the nation’s traditional alliances (e.g. NATO) in favor of the far-right axis itself, and excite their “base” through hate & oppression of various minorities (e.g. immigrants, LGBTQ+).
The Democrats are the party of “keep the system working, but when you get a chance, try to make it work better for everyone.”
The Republicans are the party of “tear the system down, and replace it with loyalty to our authority figures; keep the masses stupid and busy trampling on queers & foreigners.”
Folks on the left may think that “the system” is shit, or that it can’t be made to work better for everyone. But “keep the system running, it can be made okay” is pretty different from “tear the system down, all you need is loyalty to a strongman” which is what the far-right has to offer.
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Yeah, I literally just said today’s Democrats are a center-right party, and today’s Republicans a far-right party. Back when the Republicans were neoliberal, they were center-right. But they’re not anymore; they’re aligned with Putin and the international neofascist tendency.
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Oh! I was using “center-X” vs “far-X” as a distinction. The same distinction could be expressed maybe as “X” vs “radical-X” — the Democrats are “rightist” and the Republicans are “radical rightist” — much in the same way that we might say that social-democrats are “leftist” and revolutionary communists are “radical leftist”.
A good non-radical leader can be one who is a good manager of the current system, who gently reforms it toward social goals. However, radicals would never accept such a milquetoast weakling; they want someone who will come in, smash everything, “drain the swamp”, and implement the dictatorship of … um … someone.
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Lemmy is much less US-centric than Reddit.
Lemmy was initially created by communists.
It’s still in the process of being created, and the communism is a bit less in your face now alongside there being other contributors to the code, but that’s how it started.
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Are you arguing that Twitter is right wing because it is US-centric, and not because of Musk’s leveraged buyout?
I would argue that US social media platforms are (now) right wing because of aggressive financial attacks meant to break up open social engagement, as this is bad for business and sociopaths looking to exploit people for profit. Reddit was left wing, until it was bought and sold. Same with Twitter.
However my comment was merely rejecting the idea that Lemmy is left wing because it is not US-centric. Lemmy was started by tankies, who say they’re left wing and have some left wing ideologies, but really they’re more authoritarian fascists, and fascism is in fact right wing. However as Lemmy grew it became apparent that this stance would impede its growth - particularly in western markets - so the main devs have tried to minimise their political views and keep the program neutral; now those views are primarily concentrated at lemmygrad.
Lemmy is not US-centric, but that’s not why it’s left wing. Lemmy is left wing because rational empathetic thought is naturally left wing. Lemmy is full of communism because it was started by communists/tankies.
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The US is not inherently nor totally right wing, and Twitter was predominantly left wing until fairly recently. It might not have been full left wing socialist, but it was certainly left of centre.
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Both parties in the US government are indeed right wing, but not everyone and everything in the US is right wing.
Communism is unfortunately a dirty word in the US, and socialism isn’t far behind it. It doesn’t help that there have been numerous foreign governments that call themselves communist that the US has labeled as enemies and fought against. As a result, an American labeling themselves communist is often ostracised. However, many people do in fact hold those ideals, albeit quietly and/or without naming it such.
An American politics forum is of course going to mirror American politics.
However Twitter and reddit as a whole were left wing. Not as in reading Marx, but in being for the good of everyone, with the core principle of serving the needs of the many rather than the desires of the few. They were also incredibly liberal. They’ve since been taken over by pseudo right wing authoritarian interests, gradually since around 2016.
If you think Marxist-leninists are fascists, or like fascists, then you don’t really understand what either of those words mean man.
Most of comments on popular communities boil down to “capitalism bad communism only solution”. Very in your face and everywhere
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Yes, and I would say that’s because of lemmy’s communist/tankie roots. Which is a philosophy based in left wing ideology, however in practice it is more authoritarian fascism, which is right wing.
Really? I’ve only seen US related stuff here
How many of your subscribed communities lie outside of lemmy.world? Very possible you’ve pigeonholed yourself. World almost certainly has a heavy US bias as it was the largest instance with open registration during the exodus.
Lemmy is made up of a ton of instances, many of which have quite limited US-related content. Posts from smaller instances may not rise to the top of World but they do elsewhere. Whereas World posts are going to rise across most instances, due to sheer volume. Where the posts come from is not as indicative of diversity as where the comments and votes come from.
Wait there are others apart from world?
Hundreds. Here’s just a few places you can use for discovery.
Nice!
Is it? Just look at the comments here - the thought is about political left and right and yet almost everybody is talking about conservatives, that’s a sure sign of Americans.
Plus I bet a good portion of the extreme left here are Americans disillusioned with their government, swinging hard into the other extreme.
I wonder if there are demographics by IP already? TBH most of the threads I’ve been in have felt very US Centric. I also came with the great reddit migration too though.
On my feed, at least, I have my frontpage set to whatever the kbin equivalent to “all” is. I see lots of other languages beyond English populating - particularly German. The Lemmy instance I chose when I initially made my way to the fediverse operates out of China. They’re chill over there.
I dunno. I think if you’re only finding people discussing the US here, then you’ve probably accidentally pigeonholed yourself based on your own interests. The fediverse is diverse.
I mean yeah. Being only English speaking with gringo Spanish doesn’t let me understand memes in German or any of the other various non-english speaking magazines lol.
English is the defacto lingua franca though. Particularly on the web. The diversity I’ve seen still heavily leans English, and western, which makes plenty of sense.
Lemmy is more centrist than Reddit
(other than the usual issues) Reddit was hated by the general populace because it was too right wing and it was hated by right-wingers for not being right wing enough
Lemmy is still new and hasn’t gained a large population as of yet, but it’s already still far more representative than Reddit ever was
Yeah I gotta disagree with you on that. Reddit is more representative simply due to the fact that it’s larger. Once Lemmy grows it’ll become more diverse and therefore more representative of the general population.
More centrist???
Lemmy is like a boiling pot of full-on tankie authoritarians. Reddit is only slightly less left than that but you still get autobanned from major subs for simply commenting somewhere deemed right-wing.
This reads like you never even visited Reddit.
I have seen way, way more people crying about tankies than I have seen people advocating for Stalinism.
This reads like you never visited any instance other than lemmygrad.ml.
I mean, good point actually. It’s very possible the issue is the instance I’m logged into. I switched around the time lemmy.world was hacked. But .world honestly felt the same as sh.itjust.works. Never fails that I login and the very first thing I see is some communist circlejerk with tons of upvotes.
I’m on .world and I very rarely see anything communism-related. But I mostly browse Subscribed rather than Local or All.
This is it. The US has gone so far right that centrism seems left wing. I have been generally comfortable with the tone of the conversation in the fediverse. Occasionally, I’d like to pull the conversations further left. I’ve been peeved or mildly disappointed, but never actually enraged or flabbergasted. Conversations have been pleasant and reasonable, even when I disagree with what’s being said. It’s been pleasant.
The ultraconservatives already left for gab and truth social. There are some conservative instances and a few nazi ones as well, but the aforementioned two scooped up most of right wingers willing to jump ship.
I’ve got a bad news for you, they have their own Lemmy instance.
By definition, people with a conservative mindset are less open to change and new experience.
Federated social media is still in the new and formative stage. So it is not shocking it is still dominated by those more open to new experiences. But don’t be surprised if that shifts if/when Lemmy/kbin reach critical mass.
The internet itself has followed a similar path.
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Came here to say this. The most literal definition of the word conservative in the context of the party is “to conserve old ways”. They are resistant to change by definition.
Leftists use change as a tool to try to make things better. They’re naturally more likely to embrace something new.
Although I find it odd that conservatives today tend to have the most radicalized agenda out of all - yeah I mean there are some outright communists, but their numbers are like at most single-digit population percentages, whereas in the USA and UK and Russia and such they pretty much are the majority of people (hehe, in Russia the votes somehow outnumber the population even…:-P).
i.e. at one point they were conservative, and they still claim to be, even while wanting to change e.g. from a voting democracy to a totalitarian regime. But it changes every couple of years so it’s really hard to keep up - e.g. in the USA GW Bush was an actual progressive (like, feed poor people), but then came the Tea Partiers, ousted by the Alt Right, which is no longer considered extreme enough and on and on it goes… (as the song continues: where it will stop, nobody knows:-).
It is driven entirely by the moderators. r/Canada got taken over by alt-right moderators which attracted alt-right redditors.
Isn’t it obvious? Most of the recent wave of users to federated sites was caused by the enshittification, which means:
when an online platform becomes more monetized and less user-oriented the longer it lasts.
This is a problem caused by capitalism. Therefore many of us will be anti-capitalists. Many of us will value creating things that put people over profits.
