The more I use lemmy, the more it begins to just feel like all the same problems reddit had. It has the same problems with major communities having far left moderation standards that only apply to the right, the same hive mind users that just spam the same tired out leftist talking points over and over while refusing anything close to an actual discussion.
The only upsides are that downvotes aren’t used to punish you site wide, and the handful of non-leftist instances that exist, though they always end up defederated by all the major instances, effectively making them poor spaces for general discussion.
So what are your thoughts? Is this just the “more like under new management” from megamind? Is there hope for it to become a decent platform for everyone, not just the left?
Edit: yeah, it’s just as bad. Fuck the retarded admins and fuck the left
My opinion is that there are a lot of far left people here, that part is true. I consider myself a socialist, but not so far left that I can’t criticize Russia, China or North Korea that some here seem to be.
The only right-wing instance that has been defederated was exploding-heads.com. I was part of that discussion, I voted to defederate and I would do it again. It was nothing to do with their politics for me, it was all about the hate speech. The posts there specifically calling for the death of trans people, holocaust denial and other big red lines for me was why I wanted the defederation to happen.
A conservative who acknowledges that minorities have human rights and that historical events really happened is absolutely A-ok in my book. We might not agree on our politics, but it’s still a conversation worth having.
True. This instance is one of the better ones in terms of defederation, but unfortunately we don’t seem to be very popular in that stance. And given the nature of social media where ability to access content is a major factor, the more large instances that defederate, the worse the system as a whole gets in terms of ability to access that content.
Personally, I support a zero defederation policy, and also have accounts on those types of instances, but they’re heavily blocked by major instances, hence why I’m still here as well. I’m excited for when better apps come out for managing multiple accounts. It’s pretty annoying to have a bunch of web apps to use each different login whenever I end up going somewhere that doesn’t have federation.
I find that vanishingly few actual people (major media agitators aren’t in my books) actually hold the genuine belief that minorities don’t have rights, or aren’t deserving of them. It’s just that a lot of what progressives call rights isn’t a perspective shared by much of the conservative side of things, where you’ll generally find a more limited “life, liberty, property” set of beliefs, or at least derivative thereof.
That is an untenable position imho. I hate to use the tired old trope of the nazi bar, but a true free speech approach has been tried over and over again, and each and every time has resulted in the worst drek imaginable, and everybody who wasn’t ok with that sort of drek leaving. Having a community worth having a discussion in requires moderation, and that extends to federated platforms too.
That isn’t true from my own very subjective experiences. Quite a few don’t even consider select minorities (different ones depending on region) are even fully human.
Of course that is not universal. My own father is a conservative, and we have many a long and interesting discussion. Those people do exist, but so do those who think of minorities as sub-human.
I’m perfectly fine with individual communities enforcing their own moderation policies, and individual users taking advantage of the plenty strong blocking tools at their disposal. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if people are already working on the equivalent of chain block from Twitter for lemmy already.
But at the level of federation, it represents basic fucking functionality of the site, and it should only be leveraged as a tool against things lot bot farms or the like. Why should the users who cry for moderation the moment a single thing they don’t like shows up need to run the ship? We should go back to the days of just telling them to not browse content they don’t want to browse, and to grow the fuck up.
Forgive the double commenting, lemmy doesn’t save drafts, and I don’t like losing partial comments while I close tabs.
Could you give more concrete examples? I’m not particularly interested in defending (or not) the hypothetical someone, somewhere who holds some belief.
Sure! I’m Romanian, and Roma are very much discriminated against here. I have had a religious, conservative acquaintance tell me, completely straight-faced and honestly, that the targeting of Jews in the Romanian holocaust was terrible, we should have just stuck to killing as many Roma as possible. They are, according to him, completely impossible to “civilize”.
This is not an uncommon belief here.
EDIT: Let me be completely clear: I’m not saying you hold beliefs like that. I’m just saying “conservative” is a broad brush that includes both the reasonable and the terrible.
Eastern European politics be wildin’ lol. I’m American and was approaching it from a more American perspective, where such talk is uncommonly found, despite being commonly accused.
Agreed. In general, I’m not a fan of the relative style of political labeling because it varies so broadly over time and place since the ideas of “conservative” and “progressive” are highly dependent on the existing culture and systems of a place.