I’ve been using Lemmy for a while now, and I’ve noticed something that I was hoping to potentially discuss with the community.
As a leftist myself (communist), I generally enjoy the content and discussions on Lemmy.
However, I’ve been wondering if we might be facing an issue with ideological diversity.
From my observations:
- Most Lemmy Instances, news articles, posts, comments, etc. seem to come from a distinctly leftist perspective.
- There appears to be a lack of “centrist”, non-political, or right-wing voices (and I don’t mean extreme MAGA-type views, but rather more moderate conservative positions).
- Discussions often feel like they’re happening within an ideological bubble.
My questions to the community are:
- Have others noticed this trend?
- Do you think Lemmy is at risk of becoming an echo chamber for leftist views, a sort of Truth Social, Parler, Gab, etc., esque platform, but for Leftists?
- Is this a problem we should be concerned about, or is it a natural result of Lemmy’s community-driven nature?
- How might we encourage more diverse political perspectives while still maintaining a respectful and inclusive environment?
- What are the potential benefits and drawbacks of having a more politically diverse user base on Lemmy?
As much as I align with many of the views expressed here, I wonder if we’re missing out on valuable dialogue and perspective by not having a more diverse range of political opinions represented.
I’m genuinely curious to hear your thoughts on this.
yeah, liberals are conservative scum lol.
liberals are literally on the left wing of the spectrum, but apparently that’s not good enough for ‘arbitrary decider of who’s a leftist’ here
Leftists are socialists. Liberals are not socialists, they are liberals. Liberalism is founded on the right to private property, otherwise known as private ownership of the means of production, while socialists call for the abolition of private property (not to be confused with personal property).
You have to be at least anti-capitalist to be a leftist. That’s the bare minimum.
Lemmy liberals are centrists. They favor capitalism with regulations and social welfare.
oh I must have missed the “YOU MUST BE AT LEAST THIS ANARCHO-MARXIST TO RIDE THE LEFTIST LABEL” sign at the front of the line.
damn is this really how you think? are these really the thoughts that just bubble up in that grey matter?
way too much time on your hands if so
you’re so fucking busy delineating who’s not a good leftist that the conservatives are going to destroy you all and you’ll be quibbling about who was a real one and who’s faking being in the concentration camp.
No, liberals just aren’t leftists.
But literally, you do need to be anticapitalist to be a leftist.
Where did you learn your stance from? Its wild.
This is the result of a century of communist/socialist purges and of cold war propaganda in the US. Most Burgerstanians haven’t known their asses from their elbows politically for generations.
It isn’t a purity test, anticapitalism starts at some form of Socislism.
The liberal wants to preserve some parts of the capitalist tradition while enacting some social reforms. That puts them in the center.
You want to talk about concentration camps? The US has the largest incarcerated population in the world, and it has my entire life, since Clinton introduced the Crime Bill. The prison population almost doubled from 1990 to 2000. That’s liberalism.
Yeah, in the interest of not having a bloody, civil war, I’d rather try to correct the economic paradigm that we have rather than instill a new one that will have its own set of unique and terrible problems (for example, see nomenklatura).
The chaos that will arise from the transition will be deadly, terrifying, and profound. It is not something I wish my children to have to go through. So, yeah…of course I’d rather work to fix the system that we have.
Okay, but that’s why you aren’t a leftist.
Personally, the reason I have an .ml account instead of an account on one of the farther left instances which aren’t federated with .world is because I want to argue with people like you. I welcome the diversity of opinion between leftists and liberals, I deliberately expose myself to it. Liberals keep me sharp without being emotionally exhausting the way people farther to the right are.
We have nomencultura at home, in the Professional Managerial Class: the college educated labor aristocracy that serves the capitalist class.
They literally aren’t
Liberals support capitalism, ergo they are on the right.
Liberals are auth right on the political compass.
Leftism is anti-capitalist.
The Political Compass is generally a terrible way to view politics, I wouldn’t put any stock in it.
It’s an oversimplification and has its limitations but that’s often what’s needed to reach mass appeal and be useful in discourse.
On the contrary, it makes little sense at all. Ideologies can’t be put on a compass like that.
On the contrary, it’s is a useful heuristic, even if it’s not perfect. While ideologies are complex and multifaceted, it provides a framework to map tendencies. It simplifies ideologies, sure- but that’s precisely its value & the social/cultural dimension and is harder to map
When you simplify ideology too much, you ceate more confusion, like elsewhere in the thread when you categorize Marxist means as auth left and ends as lib left, despite Marxism being consistent in means and ends. There are far more issues with it than it solves.
But that’s just it - it’s not a useful heuristic, it’s a delusional framework, even more than the geocentric model was. We were mapping the planets onto that, but that didn’t make it useful.