In other thread I got vibe that majority of Lemmy users support communism and CCP. Is support for Russia/Putin? Or have I just stumble in a post dominated by those people.

I also read a phrase “lemmy.ml” user. Is lemmy.ml instance considered communist?

I understand there will be more left leaning users in Lemmy compared to Reddit. But I expected moderate left and not radical communist left.

What is your opinion on that?

  • @[email protected]English
    14•2 months ago

    I don’t think anyone has polls. There is a much higher far-left proportion than on Reddit, as things stand.

    Note that Reddit is one unified world, albeit with division by subreddit.

    The Threadiverse is not. Some instances have very different communities – some only permit certain types of users. And not all instances federate with each other, and if your instance doesn’t federate with another, you won’t see content from those instances.

    So, for example, lemmygrad.ml and to a lesser degree lemmy.ml has a bunch of people – including the lead Lemmy dev – who are enthusiastic about Stalin and the Soviet Union, pro-authoritarian-left. Hexbear.net is kinda out there too.

    Then you’ve got exploding-heads.com, which I believe is far-right.

    Lemmy.world is more-mainstream, but I’d certainly place it left of Reddit on average. It doesn’t federate with lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net or exploding-heads.com.

    Beehaw.org is what I’d call far-left, but less in the authoritarian camp, but they’ve defederated from lemmy.world.

    You can see defederations on an instance under “Blocked instances” at /instances. So for example:

    https://lemmy.world/instances

    Most instances also say something about their policies in the right-hand sidebar.

    I think that some of it is also that some people are very vocal about their political views, and I think that some of those are disproportionately in the far-left camp. Like, if someone wants to vent that they think that society would be better off as an anarchy or that private ownership of industry or money or whatever shouldn’t exist, I think that those people are gonna be more likely to have strong feelings about and repeatedly post about their point of disagreement than someone saying “I think that things are going pretty well, but I’d like Tweak X and Y”.

    • @Lauchs
      6•2 months ago

      I think you’ve got most of it pretty well outlined here. A couple minor additions/thoughts:

      Lemmys communist leanings are probably self reinforcing. If you’re a moderate/mainstream leftie but think communism is a but silly, well noting so will get you “yelled at” by those disproportionately loud voices. It gets tiring, so I imagine the mainstream/moderates learn to avoid communism adjacent threads/questions etc.

      There also may be an age thing. I have less time and inclination to argue with randoms online than when I was younger. And when I was younger I had much more extreme (and in retrospect some embarrassing) views.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•2 months ago

      To put it another way, when I first joined, it was to kbin.social. Kbin has a feature to help people discover new communities where it will suggest random comments. This leads to…rather dramatic cross-pollination. So, for example, I remember looking at a technology community on pawb.social. Some other random kbin.social user also showed up there, I’m sure via random comment, and was complaining that everyone in the forum was a furry. I mean…yeah, you just hopped right into the middle of their den. Same thing with yiffit.net and probably a number of other instances. Does that mean that the Threadiverse is all furries? Well, no. I’d say that it’s disproportionately so compared to Reddit, but it’s more that it’s got special-interest instances.

      Or transexual users on lemmy.blahaj.zone.

      Or porn enthusiasts on lemmynsfw.com.

      Or underage anime porn fans on burggit.moe.

      Or science enthusiasts on mander.xyz.

      Or Star Trek fans on startrek.website.

      Hop onto any of those or communities on those, and you’re likely to find a lot of content of the sort that the instance focuses on. But if your instance doesn’t federate with them, you may not see that material at all, nor the users on those instances.