- I am not saying you shouldn’t shame people for their voting choice as a demonstration of lack of critical thought or moral compass. You should.
- I am not saying that all the political parties are equally guilty. I am obviously talking about Trump as the much greater evil of the available evils.
- I am not saying that votes never count or have impact. They sometimes do.
All I really want to say is that blaming your friends and family for the election outcome is misguided and probably serves to benefit the political machine in its current form more than it serves to affect voter choice.
Lemmy is a bit of a liberal echo chamber.
“Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
When Hillary Clinton refused to connect with the “working class” base that was supposedly the realm of the Democrats, she started the trend that not only lost her own personal election, but looking back, I think we’ll pin the demise of the entire modern Democratic party upon that pivotal point.
People said the same about what Trump did to the Republican party but… the facts seem to speak for themselves: they were wrong (apparently, even while unfortunately).
We were warned. People like Dave Chappelle offered what I consider great insight into the situation - especially now that he is validated for having been able to correctly predict the outcome. Donald Trump at least SPOKE TO the working people (here I mean the “middle class” - the poorest people actually still voted Dem, as too did the richest, but the largest group in the middle felt that the Dems were not listening to their needs). Now mind you, HE LIED, but at least he bothered to speak to them.
And it is human nature to want to feel heard, rather than ignored. Although now how ironic that the Democratic party, having mostly ignored the middle class, got ignored by them in turn (or even the opposite: having switched them to vote Repub). It’s almost like karma is a bitch, and tends to (even if not always then most of the time) circle back around so that our actions bite us in the ass?
Even Jon Stewart (my hero) tried to warn us. But I gave up posting such content b/c it was always so heavily down-voted and people spoke with such hostility against it (while also somehow simultaneously choosing to miss the entire point). In one example, my post “[Opinion] Biden Must Resign”, which mind you was not even my opinion but an article written by The Atlantic - one of the last stalwart hold-outs of reasoning left in American media. Forget for a moment whether it was validated or not, and forget even whether Biden resigning was a good idea or not - why should it not even have been something that people could choose to discuss, as rational agents of free will & choice? Instead, that post is among the least popular content that community has ever seen - earning what looks to me like a unique distinction of having the highest mixture of number of downvotes and downvote-to-upvote ratio present since its inception (sort the community by Controversial and scan downwards until you see the first post with a DOUBLE-DIGIT negative score; Lemmy makes it next to impossible to see actual separated vote counts but on a mobile but not desktop I can see that it has 15 total upvotes and 61 downvotes, and you can read the comment section for yourself to see how relevant and/or controversial the topic was).
And similarly, literally award-winning videos such as this post get passed over and criticized with shallow rule-based comments, with at least one person there (and in its cross-post) outright admitting to downvoting it without having watched it.
Which is… what it is, we can’t push content onto people that are not receptive to it. Your post here hasn’t been removed, but it wasn’t exactly promoted in people’s feeds either, so that it could be discussed. Instead it is far more of just you shouting into the void, to a non-receptive audience.
TLDR: don’t expect much in the way of “deep thought” here on Lemmy. If you do manage to find such a community, please let me know and I will join too? Despite how people say that Lemmy is reminiscent of the olden days when Reddit was new (I wouldn’t know, I wasn’t on it at the time yet), that kind of content still seems too “niche” to appear here. I do see glimmers of it, and overall here we are far more kind than on Reddit, but while the average experience is better here than there, the top end of wanting to have rational discussions about controversial topics is denied to us by overall lack of interest.
One exception is !bestoflemmy@lemmy.world, but you can see how few posts appear there, plus as a rule it can only feature content posted first elsewhere (and I have gotten several posts removed from there or locked for not matching their rules or being too controversial, e.g. Very well-stated (& calm) response to what is turning into a heated discussion about users on the hexbear.net instance).
So… it is what it is indeed.
This isn’t just a bit of a liberal echo chamber
Lemmings have the belief that talking about neutral or grey areas incite the opposition and they’re willing to go on loud, masturbatory tirades and attack others to control the narrative and shut down conversation
Your examples are great ones.
My opinion is that there’s an ultra loud monitority of individuals here who are super focused on a small selection of the left wing agenda (identity politics is a big one, Israel is another, AI is a third).
I think the solution is to appeal to a broader audience and grow the platform but it’s a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy at the moment
The tools simply are not there. We already have a much higher moderator to user ratio than e.g. Reddit, but reportedly the moderation tools themselves are quite poor. The UI also is not as advanced as Reddit, although then again we don’t have ads. And MAJOR federation issues abound, involving reporting of content, moderation actions, and even content itself.
Looking at any given post, the number of votes, and comments, differs wildly when viewed from Lemmy.World or elsewhere - e.g. a recent [post[(https://piefed.social/post/330559) of mine shows 172 upvotes on PieFed.social, but the same post viewed from discuss.online shows only 85 votes, and from Lemmy.World that post shows 180 upvotes and 2 downvotes. I’m using votes here as they are easy to see, but the set of comments also can vary, as I saw with a previous post from Star.Trek.website to the Ten Forward community on Lemmy.world: I could not respond to people even several days later, bc I hadn’t yet been able to view their replies to me!
This issue has been known for a very long time, and tbf when Lemmy.World upgrades to the now-released 0.19.7 it should help. Maybe. With this one particular cause of federation artifacts.
However, what turns people away irl is the extremist content here, particularly on Lemmy.ml I think. 100% of the people that I have told about Lemmy irl have not only refused to join it but have actively chided me for having mentioned it to them, citing the presence of extremist content as their reason. They did not give details but take a look and it’s not hard to see at all (well, perhaps the frequency has fallen sharply now, after the election? I’ve managed to block them so I wouldn’t know) - posts against the USA, or the UK, or Germany, or basically the West in general, or capitalism, some even inciting literal murder of people merely for participating in it to the level of e.g. owning stocks. Setting aside the ethics of owning stocks - perhaps you or I would never choose to do so? - advocating for the murder of those who do is most definitely extremist, on par with right-wing extremism inside the USA, even if this other form calls itself leftist.
Mind you, Xhitter is becoming extremist as well, but (a) it has become grandfathered into the public consciousness, and more recently (b) even so, people are now finally leaving it in droves for similar reasons.
And because of this, Lemmy will never become “mainstream”. You can’t repeatedly punch people in the face - i.e. Western culture - and then hope that people from said Western culture feel entirely welcomed there. I almost left the Fediverse myself, after wandering into Chapotraphouse@hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml and seeing what goes on there - why would I stick around after seeing that? But since before being on Lemmy I had started on Kbin, I knew that the Fediverse could get better, so I stuck around when I heard that I could block those two instances - whereas you on Lemmy.World are already defederated from them to begin with. The average experience for someone new just checking out Lemmy is SO MUCH WORSE than you may realize, outside of that protected environment, and especially with some websites talking about Lemmy mentioning that Lemmy.ml is the main instance (it used to be) - and btw, its default, with no account, is to show posts from Local, not All. So the West-(especially America-)hating posts are even more prominently displayed as other communities flee from that instance.
I think that PieFed and Mbin, as they improve their software offerings, has a chance to gain mainstream popularity - probably nowhere near the level of Bluesky and Xhitter and Reddit, but like Mastodon levels. However Lemmy does not. At least imho, though I suppose we’ll see. The lack of moderation tools is an enormous one though, so as other implementations of the ActivityPub protocol gain traction, it should fall further behind, becoming more and more the echo chamber that everyone (rightly) accuses Reddit of having become. In contrast, PieFed is leading up to explore a democratization of handling unpopular content: instead of having a handful of moderators make the calls, the community itself can vote and the votes get translated into actions that are up to the recipient user to decide what they want to do with them. e.g. PieFed auto-collapses comments below one score threshold (it’s easy enough to click to expand and see it though), and auto-removes comments below a different threshold (I basically disabled this entirely by setting it to 10000 downvotes). Here, instead of the binary model whereby a moderator “removes” content for everyone, or else not remove it, I get to decide myself what I want done, and there are multiple layers of choices.
Thanks, this was educational
Do you think there’s currently a better platform than Lemmy for reddit-shaped content ?
No. Threads is defunct and corporate. Other forum areas came and seemed to mostly go more due to non-software issues (e.g. squabbles, and iirc is it discuit that is still ongoing, but still needing invitations? Whichever one it is, if my memory is failing on the name, it has decided not to grow further beyond what it is now.)
Lemmy has the most polished codebase but turns mainstream people away with its political extremism, though many people worth talking to hide out amidst all that, having merely blocked it and staying in a different “corner” of the Fediverse. Sublinks promised to be different while also being backwards compatible with Lemmy, but nobody seems to have heard of any progress made for months.
PieFed is exciting, has SUPER responsive and active devs, and currently seems the best poised for the future, after it develops an API that would allow the former Reddit apps to work with it just as readily as with Lemmy. Though currently its web UI is an odd mixture having more fully functional features than Lemmy while also lacking a great deal of the more foundational polish for more active threads.
Oh, there is Mbin though, which is pretty great. Technically it should count since it accesses both Lemmy and Mastodon content. Like Lemmy it both has and also lacks a great deal of features - e.g. PieFed has categories of communities, making discovery by a new user much easier, and PieFed allows you as a non-admin user to block all the users from an entire instance (let’s say hexbear.net or Lemmy.ml) while neither Lemmy nor Mbin allow that. Some Lemmy apps do this though, and more. Mbin has an API, and e.g. the Interstellar app works with it, though it may not matter since both Mbin and Lemmy are federated with one another.
And to be comprehensive, there’s also the Tesseract alternative front end UI to Lemmy, as implemented on e.g. dubvee.org. iirc most people using “Lemmy” are using an app rather than the base Lemmy web UI, so that if the backend were swapped out with Sublinks, Mbin, PieFed, or something else implementing the ActivityPub protocol then people may hardly notice. Except for those additional features that some have but not others, and noticeable effects such as when blocking someone if they can continue to silently talk at and invisibly stalk you around the Fediverse, that may make a difference to users in their choice of back-end.
Anyway, most people are still on Reddit. It’s not merely from habit and the fact that everyone else (especially for niche interests) is still there as well. We out here on the fringes have that “early adopter” mindset that will put up with a lot that normal people simply won’t. They remain there bc they legitimately like it more than here.
I exceeded the character threshold, so here is a part 2, if it’s not too annoying to have this long of a response. Definitely read the other one first though.
There are also indicator labels applied to user accounts, to distinguish between e.g. brand-new vs. established accounts, who may be unfamiliar with the way things work. There are already labels on Lemmy though iirc solely for yes-I-am-a-bot vs. not, whereas PieFed is extending that much further to include suspected bots, suspected trolls, etc. e.g. if someone receives more downvotes than upvotes, or especially like a week-old account whose sole claim to karma is 10 downvotes total, that account absolutely gets labeled. Now mind you, it’s merely a label - not a “ban” or anything - and it’s possible to come back from such.
Again, it’s up to the individual users what to do with these labels - ignore them? Remove them entirely from their display? Filter content using them, so as to avoid wasting their time? The latter would be someone who would likely downvote the content in any case, so perhaps it’s better for both parties involved that they can simply filter it out. In short, good fences make good neighbors, especially among the most judgemental people who rush to such without thinking.
You can read more about it here: https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/.
Now maybe in the future these indicator labels will go further and be used by instance admins or community mods to render judgements. But that isn’t even possible now (yet), and someone can always spin up their own instance regardless, or as PieFed and Mbin (well, rather Kbin) did, even make their own entire implementation of the ActivityPub protocol. And on those instances, they could go back to the human moderation model, with appropriate tools provided to make that happen - if someone will put forth the effort to make those ofc. In short, we can do whatever we want, but so too can others. But anyway, for now they are merely labels, and some Lemmy apps already do similarly (e.g. put a label next to “new accounts”), which seems quite helpful to proffer that additional information in case it helps guide someone to how they want to position themselves based on users’ measured “reputation” - which people do irl anyway.
I would worry more then about vote manipulation at that point: would corporate types spin up their own instance and make a bunch of bots that would downvote every post or comment that negatively mentions their product? If we had a large enough userbase, then they would be remiss in their profit-seeking strategies if they did not. There are definitely things to worry about for the future, but there’s little point planning an endgame for Lemmy when it looks as though it will literally never reach mainstream like Mastodon has. We can either accept that, or work to change it.