Fediverse

Weakness, If you're here for anything other than the narrow view.

Even if you're here for the the narrow view take a moment and consider if an echo chamber is good for you.

I think it's a strength because I don't want to chat with fascists, thanks

I just wish the top posts on the meme pages were more than just an anti-capitalist caption and a vaguely related image.

Weakness.

Limited range of political views breeds echo chamber. In my experience, you can't really have meaningful discussion inside an echo chamber. Disagreement, compromise, nuance doesn't exists inside an echo chamber. Just that same idea repeated over and over again.

Gonna be honest, you can't have meaningful and nuanced discussion here. Everything is black and white. Capitalism? It's the worst thing on earth. Religious people? Those people are idiots. Don't YOU dare use Windows, use Linux instead. ALL cops are bad, no exception.

This kind of things makes me actually scared of recommending people to Lemmy. I'm sure most people are casual people who doesn't have extreme views on anything. Just some people who wants to shut their brain off and scroll. I feel like the echo chamber I mentioned will put most people off.

Going tangent a bit--In general fediverse is not diverse.

When you scroll, you realize most of the post comes from the same kind of political ideas, same country (USA), same beliefs, etc.

You can't spell fediverse without spelling diverse, yet I feel like fediverse is anything but diverse.

This needs to change.

Weakness, definitely. The range of "permitted" ideas is way too narrow.
I tend to agree with most common political stances on Lemmy, but still I feel I'm self-censoring occasionally.

Many instances intentionally want an echo chamber. Posts and comments are often deleted even if they're not abusive, if they are ideologically opposed.

Honestly, especially recently I feel like this place has been just a big Opinion Bubble/Echo Chamber and as someone who values trying to avoid these types of Bubbles and wanting to see what other opinions may look like this has consistently been one of my Biggest Issues with Lemmy. Not to mention that making it really hard to honestly recommend Lemmy to outsiders

The political divesity is less of an issue than the political ferver. Most people don't want to talk aboit politics. They want to avoid political discussions, and get upset when people do things as basic as pointing out that politics exists in their bubble.

The fediverse turns them off because it's loaded with politically aware and stubbornly vocal people, not because there aren't enough people playing apologetics for the ruling class

I don't see it as either. I don't come to social media to engage in political discussions, so for me, the bigger issue is the lack of thriving communities around topics outside of national/world politics and technology. I'd love to see more places like startrek.online.

@crimeschneck Personally I've decreased my Lemmy usage a lot due to its echo chambery-ness. I avoided the political subs since day one, both since I'm personally not a big politics junkie and because I'm not in alignment with Lemmy's specific brand of politics, but things also extend to other topics as well.

A lot of the enjoyment of using Lemmy is getting news/articles and seeing what people think, but even in the tech spaces the range of tech news is somewhat limited and the top comments are almost always in line with Lemmy's specific tech thoughts (regardless of my agreement, I'd like to see interesting thoughts/commentary, if I can predict the theme of what's said it becomes less interesting). Sorting by new did help a little, even if a dissenting but well thought out idea was downvoted to oblivion I could still read it - but the value of link aggregators to me is articles + strangers thoughts, and if all the strangers have the same thoughts then I might as well stick with RSS.

My 2c anyways.

I think it helps to place labels onto things... and then respect those labels.

Like porn: it can get someone literally fired if they chanced upon such at work - some corpos are just looking for any excuse to cut costs, especially a repeating salary one. But so long as it is labeled, and does not appear outside of bounds... then what is the harm? (more even, studies show that places that ban porn tend to have higher rates of sexualized crime i.e. rape, so the presence of porn literally seems to help society?)

And politics: so many of us here LOVE to discuss it! But what if someone had anxiety, and could not? Could they use something like hashtags, keywords, trigger warnings I dunno, and block out most of it, for the sake of their sanity? If not, then their only recourse would be to opt-out of the Fediverse entirely, thereby taking all of the content that they would have contributed with them...

Full disclosure of my own biases: this is why I am against places such as ChapoTrapHouse from being federated with most Lemmy instances (even as I support e.g. lemm.ee's desire to keep it) - it's not that I want it to "not exist" (I've enjoyed many of my own interactions there... though it is also simultaneously true that many users from hexbear [or their alts] act as toxic bullies, ignoring people's consent outside of those spaces, despite being told explicitly not to by their admins), so much as that I want it to be properly labeled & constrained, so that someone does not walk into it unawares, not realize what it is, and then leave the Fediverse entirely having been turned away from us due to their interactions with them.

Likewise much of the content on lemmy.ml is very much not only anti-capitalist, but anti-Western - the former I sympathize with, though the vehemence with which it is delivered and especially the latter will turn people away, as it definitely has me (especially when it abuses blatantly false tropes).

And that is the identical reason why we cannot federate with conservative spaces either, if we want to survive: it is not that we want them to not exist so much as we cannot host their content here, without making THAT action a part of our own identity. And to be clear, I don't mean content such as "God loves us, each & every one of us" (that's kinda an awesome thought, is it not, regardless of what we each personally believe?), but rather "I know I speak for [my specific version of a god] when I say that he (she? it? them? other?) hates some people, especially YOUR type in particular!"

But even if we took it as a given, purely for the sake of a hypothetical argument mind you, that we actually did want some type of space to not exist, what are we going to do about it - sabotage their servers? And after they spin up new ones, with better protections - then what? No, the real recourse (imho) is to simply leave them be, yet not choose to federate their content here. We all were young & naive once too - they may grow given time, or not, but that's their business, and all we can and should (and actually MUST) control is ours.

In all of the above cases - including the pornography example - it is not what the content is (or sometimes not just that), so much as the unfriendliness of it appearing outside of bounds, causing legitimate pain and harm when it is exposed to people.

I think the way to maximize utility is to increase diversity by increasing welcomingness. Sorta like how Linux does not push people into any one distro, or window manager, or anything at all - we each are free to pursue our own paths. That's fucking awesome!:-P

Lest anything think that I've refused to answer the question: it is both. Our (future) political diversity can both be a wedge driven between us - if we allow that to happen naturally - or else a source of strength, e.g. to allow a centrist person to post content unrelated to their political beliefs (woodworking? a game community?), so long as they are respectful of other people's beliefs in the process. We don't all have to like one another, just get along. In diversity we find strength... or we could, if we did it right, i.e. if only the ones offered in good faith were allowed to stay while all others given the boot, and even then they need to remain within their allotted lanes.

Preemptively to the people who will scroll to the bottom of this, see me saying that diversity is a strength, and comment or just downvote and move on without bothering to read the rest: fuck you. But to anyone willing to offer a good-faith critique: I am listening.

No echo-chamber is stronger for it. It's a weakness.

I think it's both. I can avoid having to engage with cruel or shitty perspectives as often, but I also don't love spending so much social time in an echo chamber, it's not great for you.

I think echo chambers are really bad for a culture and for people immersed in them, but like not seeing Nazi shit is certainly nice

It's definitely a weakness. There is an entire spectrum of personal beliefs, but wherever you are, if yours don't align with the mods you get censored. Reality is every new users first week is finding out where they 'belong' and this both discourages new users, and creates detrimental echo chambers.

Maybe lemmy will grow over time to include more types of people.

Social unrest may evolve this network faster than expected, in particular ways that are not foreseen. So, in my mind there are two paths for lemmy. A stable growth or chaotic .

Edit : unrest in any country that has a lot of lemmy users if alternative social networks clamp down or are unsafe to use

There is a bunch of angry brigading here for any of a multitude of reasons, and that shear wall of vitriol thrown at people doesn't help lemmy grow.

Mixed opinion these days often reads more like outright polarization vs balanced discussions.

Sit at a table with Nazis and you just make more nazis