Until the rule is removed, any new posts about US politics will be removed.
This rule applies only to the AskLemmy community. A ban on US politics posts in AskLemmy makes sense for several reasons:
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US politics tends to dominate many online spaces already, drowning out other valuable discussions.
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Political discussions, especially about US politics, often become heated and polarized quickly, which can detract from the thoughtful, contemplative atmosphere that open-ended questions are meant to foster. When people discuss US politics, they tend to take hardened positions rather than engaging in genuine exploration of ideas.
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US political discussions often fall into predictable patterns and talking points, which goes against the spirit of having thought-provoking questions. The same debates tend to play out repeatedly, offering little new insight or opportunity for meaningful reflection.
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A community focused on open-ended questions should ideally have a global perspective. US political discussions can make the space feel less welcoming to non-US users who might have fascinating questions and perspectives to share about their own cultures, philosophies, and experiences.
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There are other communities whose purpose better aligns with discussions about US politics.
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People need some communities where they can engage with others and NOT have to see or think about the recent election.
Nobody wants every community to be a free-for-all about every topic. Please feel free to discuss US politics in a relevant community about the US, about politics, or about world news.
Thank you so much !
[email protected] seems like a good place to redirect those conversations, maybe you could consider adding it to the sidebar, should the rule become permanent?
Commenting again to repeat that I think it’s awesome that you’re going with a redirect rather than the ban hammer approach.
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Community for political discussion: [email protected] , mods please feel free to post this anywhere if you’d like to avoid the political posts/questions :)
Instead of complaining can someone who dislikes this decision please just create a community like “AskLemmyUS”, post a link here so people can find it and get on with it?
I like preference for self posts!
Proper discussion, not politics echo chamber staffed by dnc clowns
politics echo chamber
That better be talking about a lack of diverse left wing opinions, not just a lack of republicans
both… and more…
US political discourse is a pathetic Republican/Democrat circle jerk, then pika face when all we get are regime whore clowns swapping the office while quality of life deteriorates for bottom 80%
Republicans don’t have any political policy, so it’s not surprising that there’s noyhing to discuss.
Did not stop them from the spanking the “good guys” in these elections lol
Ha ha very funny I love when fundamental rights get eroded
That’s what I’ve told so many complaining people. If anyone wanted to they could make one and it would be filled with users in hours, just click create community. Hell tell the mods here to suggest people go there for those discussions, they’d probably link it in the sidebar. But someone has to do it. (And as a mod of a few other communities, someone else can take that one)
But that would be US ExCePtIoNaLiSm!
No, US exceptionalism is turning every single general purpose community into US politics.
For the 4% of Earth’s population that does indeed live in the US, there could be local communities.
It’s still weird to me that there is no US instance. LW and lemm.ee are hosted in Europe, SJW and lemmy.ca in Canada, lemmy.ml and hexbear use a European datacenter.
I mean there is midwest.social and dubvee, but we could have expected a large US instance to have emerged by now.
The closest is probably https://lemmy.today/, but only has 194 users per month.
As a lemmy.today user myself (though not American), it’s cozy in there!
But the numbers are surprisingly low. It’s an instance that is run without donations though, only on the good will of its creator (who refuses donations citing sufficient income to keep it as a hobby project), so I imagine having it big could potentially become a strain.
There used to be dmv.social, which iirc was in Washington DC? It got shut down due to the CSAM attacks, before the automated software, and iirc just frustration in general with how toxic people were being.
And I see a bunch more actually, at https://lemmy.fediverse.observer. 2 of the top 20 instances even are located in the USA. Lemmy.sdf.org with >500 MAUs, beehaw.org with ~400, StarTrek.website with ~200, lemmy.today, ttrpgnetwork, and discuss.online (where jgrim of SubLinks is an admin) are all recognizable. Ofc, the caveat being if I am reading that page correctly - or like perhaps some proxy was used, even a random one and this data could be all wrong who knows - but it at least looks this way?:-)
Lemmy.sdf.org had a lot of federation issues until recently. They are also very FOSS oriented rather than generic
I don’t even consider Beehaw a Lemmy instance anymore as they defederate LW and SJW
I should have probably said “generic US instance”, with communities like AskUSA, CasualUS, this kind of things
In looking into why they defederated, it seems due to the poor implementation of moderation tools and the insistence of the largest instances on unregulated signups, which tend to allow trolls to easily evade blocks? Though from Kbin.social, StarTrek.website, Discuss.Online, and now PieFed.social, I have been able to see Beehaw the entire time iirc.:-)
Speaking as one myself, I think Americans tend not to be so proud of our country, especially lately. The enormous exception is ofc conservatives, who don’t tend to come here.
Part of the reason might be the ginormous size of just thousands of miles separating coast to coast, and more besides to Alaska or Hawaii etc. And more than merely geography there are the cultural divides, between North vs. South, East vs. West, and Midwest, etc. Though none of those matter even half as much as rural vs. urban.
Liberals (urban) tend to feel part of a global community, while conservatives (rural) turn inwards and want to focus only on ourselves - at which point the liberals don’t feel comfortable in such a space, as e.g. X provides. So while there are very good reasons to be, feeling “proud to be an American”, especially on a day like today, seems ironically anti-American, if that makes any sense. But yeah, people definitely are going to want to bitch and moan about the election results - as we should - and ironically there too we will do so alongside our global compatriots, in a global community, and probably on an instance outside of the USA since as you said there isn’t a large major one that seems all that suitable:-).
What about Lemmy.today? You’d want to check with them first ofc. They don’t even have a blocklist at all though - not even the CSAM ones so I don’t know how they do that. At a guess it may cause them problems to send so much traffic.
Or perhaps one of the PieFed or Mbin instances? They federate community content the same as any Lemmy instance I thought. Oh but the moderation aspect might make that prohibitive.
It could be really good to have some of those, like AskUSA where people ask what US State they should move to, to get away from lack of abortion care within their own location:-(. Though ironically an educated European may provide better answers than a confident-sounding American spouting off nonsense, as usual!:-)
Though from Kbin.social, StarTrek.website, Discuss.Online, and now PieFed.social, I have been able to see Beehaw the entire time iirc.:-)
As you know, I’m not the biggest LW fan, but even I wouldn’t use an account defederated from LW, especially with SJW on top. You’re missing probably 80% of the active communities, and 15% of the remaining are on lemmy.ml
Part of the reason might be the ginormous size of just thousands of miles separating coast to coast, and more besides to Alaska or Hawaii etc.
Even with that, why is there no Californian or New York instance? Seems weird to me seen how populous and tech oriented those places are
It’s still weird to me that there is no US instance.
Damn good thing. We definitely don’t want one hosted in a fascist country.
Hey, we won’t be fascist for at least another month or two!? 🗓️
Yes, not until Jan. 20th (MLK Day, he’d be so proud!). But it’s not like someone’s gonna set up a big Lemmy server, then move it to a different country later.
How the fuck is Lemmy supposed to serve as an open alternative to corporate controlled social media when the mods ban discussing one of the most impactful events of the day? You should be begging people to talk about politics here. Unsubbed. EDIT: AND BLOCKED. If I wanted to hang out in a fascist community I’d join twitter.
By giving people the opportunity to host their own instances and create their own communities with rules they like. This however does not mean that everything should be allowed everywhere. Actually this means that everywhere you go people make their own rules and if you dont like them, go somewhere else or create your own community.
This however is the main problem of social media in general. It creates circles of like-minded people where it is really easy to reject “other” thoughts and accept “our” ideas without much questioning. This is less a problem for people who are trained in critical thinking, but might be dangerous for more unstable people.
I’m just saying that a mix of different views is always good to some degree. Whether/how this should be done on Lemmy is a different thing.
Absolutely. If this rule was a permanent rule I don’t think so many people would defend it. However from experience (reddit for example) I think many people know that US politics has the ability to claim and overrun just about every space on the “western” internet. This is not something that really creates value for many people especially those that don’t live in the US and I think this ruling is trying to prevent that.
It creates circles of like-minded people where it is really easy to reject “other” thoughts and accept “our” ideas without much questioning.
I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but there is an argument to be made that we should actually go back to smaller, more secluded forums on the internet that are less connected with outside views.
Very interesting, haven’t seen that Kurzgesagt yet, thanks for sharing 🤘🏻
Interesting, thanks
I generally agree with your points on not wanting to create echo chambers; however, another reason for temporarily banning the topic imo is not just to block people talking about it but also to protect people who are already hurting, grieving, and generally just trying to find some sort of escape at the moment. Creating a space that will guarantee a temporary escape is nice, I think.
Ridiculous copy/paste reply. You’re not making a good case for people leaving corporate media for Lemmy. You’re encouraging them to stay where they are.
What’s wrong about it though? The freedom lies in the ability to create your own community that is not regulated by one company/organisation owning the platform. You can go to the place where you agree with the rules and you don’t have to live under the rules of someone you don’t like.
They’re just butthurt that they’re not being allowed to spew their hot takes all over this community as a captive audience that isn’t interested.
Nobody was doing that here, though. Have you even seen this community? It’s super inactive to begin with.
What’s wrong is fracturing. Lemmy is not so massive that it can sustain niche communities for every little topic.
I wouldn’t consider US politics a small topic, especially on Lemmy
It’s not a small topic, it’s a small community to set up all these tiny communities.
Community is what we called subs on the other site.
How are political communities tiny when they are 2 of the 6 most active communities on Lemmy?
To be honest, the issue is mostly about [email protected] banning self posts (and thus people having to find alternatives such as [email protected] ) rather than the mods of [email protected]
Not every sub has to revolve around US elections all day/weeks/months long. That has nothing to do with corporate media.
If some other country had a historic election, I would HOPE to see open dialog spread in places like this for people to express themselves. Why ban an internationally relevant discussion when people have the choice to be members of the community. How about - if you don’t like it, you can leave.
But there are places for the discussion to be made. Lemmy as a whole did not ban the elections discussion, just this one specific sub. In fact, you’ll see basically every single sub of Lemmy discussing it.
This is a temporary rule for 1 single community.
How about - if you don’t like it, you can leave.
The irony in this sentence…
Many Reddit subreddits also don’t allow politics.
I’m for making a megathread for people who really want to talk about it here but I genuinely don’t understand why you’re upset you can’t talk about US politics everywhere in the platform. There are tons of communities for that. AskLemmy is for
open-ended, thought provoking questions
Instead, most US related posts are for venting and complaining. See these communities instead:
And dozens of similar communities on other instances. It’s not censorship to ask you to go to use the proper channels, not everyone here wants to see US news everywhere.
Thank you for responding with a redirect instead of a shut-down.
It’d be different if the instance was actually crowded and overrun, but it isn’t. The instance gets like 20 posts on a good day.
upset you can’t talk about US politics everywhere in the platform
I’m upset that a moderator believes that banning the discussion of a major national / international event is healthy for the community. I could understand that for a niche community like Music but not one of the most popular general purpose ones. There’s no reason this should be banned other than a personal preference. This informs me that the moderators of this community are not interested in an open platform for genuine discussion.
I’m not from the US and my Lemmy feed has been absolutely FLOODED with US political news for MONTHS. Yesterday’s vote was the bushel that broke the camel’s back, and I definitely understand non-political communities not wanting to be even more flooded with US politics than they already are.
Go complain about your broken country in politics-oriented communities, please, and let us talk about other, less despair-inducing subjects.
my Lemmy feed has been absolutely FLOODED with US political news for MONTHS
Damn I’m so glad that propaganda flow that for some reason was even allowed in most of Lemmy will stop now.
Remember your words when Netanyahu bombs Gaza and people want to ask the community about it.
Just because YOU don’t want to hear about something doesn’t mean en entire community should BAN discussion of it. It’s absolutely bonkers that anyone can rationalize this position.
That’s not US politics. And the rule is temporary; the goal is just to get a breather after a months-long marathon of hearing about nothing else on Lemmy.
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Israel & Gaza are litterally on the other side of the world, on a different continent. Don’t they teach you geography in school?
How is the American presidential choice of picking 80 year old sociopath Donald Trump not a thought provoking issue?
But sure. Let’s focus on why Bananas are yellow.
I just created two posts over there, one over the likelihood of project 2025 to happen, and the other one about people actually considering leaving the USA. Feel free to join the discussion
Mods are people of the community too. If you don’t like them, you can make your own community.
That’s a bad take. The mods made the choice to moderate a general-purpose community in the first place. If they want a more narrowly-focused community, they should make one.
Because we’re glad it is finally over after having deal with your election bullshit for the last half year? We made contingency plans for a trump win, so we acknowledged his win this morning, hope the planning is sufficient, and finally move on to something else.
Because you can go to literally any instance and create a community just for political drivel or even just go to the hundreds of other communities already dedicated to exactly that.
No kidding.
… You know you can just create a community and post stuff there, right?
Good riddance man, Sheesh. Why are you so upset?
Bye, no one misses you. You won’t be much valuable for this community anyways so it’s better if you aren’t here
Most impactful event of the decade. This reaches far beyond the US.
Feel free to discuss it on [email protected] https://lemmy.world/c/politicaldiscussion
You can literally go anywhere to see your dumbass yank circus. Leave me alone.
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Boohoo I’ll believe that when it happens. In the meanwhile there’s literally nothing I can do about it. Instead of cry and doompost on the internet I’d rather focus on things that matter and keep a positive outlook.
Go away.
Byeeee!!! 👋👋
100% agree.
The moderation is completely out of hand. Instead of being happy we have a platform where we can discuss things outside of big tech platforms, we have people who think moderation is more important than letting people express what is on their mind, specially on this day.
Wish I could make the mods be a bit mature here, but probably not.
Whats next, banning people for discussing moderation? I would not be surprised at this point.
I’ve been here from the start so I’m just angry to see this kind of thing here. Whoever mod who did this should look in the mirror and think “is my behavior a plus or a minus for the platform”.
Hold on, do you think this is a ban across all of Lemmy?
Feel free to express what’s on your mind in any of the US politics communities on Lemmy.
Would it be possible to have a single mega thread for all US politics questions?
There are alot of worried, scared people with alot of questions. Why not have a place for it, keeping the rest out of the community.
Thanks, other communities like [email protected] don’t have such rules, the community is overriden with questions about US politics
I get that it’s annoying, but we’re sad, and angry, and scared, and we don’t know where to go. Maybe someone will make us a community called “Now what?” where we can cry, shout, wallow a bit, and then make a plan for survival.
Yeah I think both are valid tbh. I get that a lot of people don’t want to hear and and I get that a lot of people are upset. How do you compromise and help with both?
Easy, don’t make rules banning the subjects people want to talk about. Are we so concerned about people’s thumbs we can ask them to just scroll past content that doesn’t interest them but suits the theme of the community?
Be the change you want to see then. You can make that community. I mean this in a supportive way. Go for it!
[email protected] seems good as it allows self-posts
[email protected] for news
I appreciate the confidence and encouragement, but I’m completely unqualified. I’m likely the least techie lemmy user. If there were tech levels, I would in the ‘I can set up a printer about 60% of the time’ category.
If you remind me later - I have to get ready for work soon - I’ll help you if you want. Its fairly easy. Easier than a printer, so you’re already qualified lol
[email protected] seems good as it allows self-posts
[email protected] for news
Two posts for you
Sure, but… is “too much discussion” really a problem that Lemmy has? This is kind of a threatening time for some of us, especially if we don’t have a lot of friends irl.
“Too much off topic discussion or discussion in one topic that stifles other conversations”
Better?
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Any meme community. Easy example. Are you even trying?
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Name a single election topic you know about that’s not US. I’ll wait.
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I get it, but realistically there’s only like 20 posts a day left in here. Nothing is really getting overrun.
10 yesterday. We are too small for temp rules.
But would those 10 people make other 10 posts when they are overrun by posts unrelated to this community by people who don’t want discussion and just want to vent their anger?
Very good point
I came here since I was fed up with the politics on Reddit.
I was pretty disappointed when I saw the same thing happening here. So thanks!
It’s honestly tiring to see the 20th post on the same topic from a country you don’t live in
pointless. the entire lemmy will be on fire for a month or so.
I’ve blocked all US political communities. I’ve blocked 20+ users who posted US political content in other communities. When I now filter by most popular in the last 24h, it’s only US election outcome content.
Seems like a good reason to have this kind of rules
Also I posted in [email protected] a thread for non political communities
Thank you! Could this be permanent? People can use an AskLemmyPolitics community if they really need to.
[email protected] seems good as it allows self-posts
[email protected] for news
That or maybe politics Friday when those posts are allowed?
at this point i’m starting to believe that the reddit format just rots people’s brains.
i don’t know the reason behind this decision, maybe it was taken in bad faith or something, but the amount of people shitting and pissing themselves over this when there are already other communities better specialized for it is mind numbing.Indeed
ABOUT FUCKING TIME!
I disagree with this decision because people need to ask questions to prepare for their safety.
Please reconsider this rule.
[email protected] has 5 few active threads since yesterday, such as
Feel free to open others if needed
We just had probably the most consequential election of our life and you want to ban discussion? Jeezus.
This is an ask community, not a politics community. Not everything revolves around America
… And now you can’t ask anything about politics. There’s was doubtless going to be political questions to ask, and politic adjacent (where do I move) that will all be removed.
And you can’t even ask about effects on the world either! Gaza, Ukraine, NATO, trade, tariffs, etc. Are those going to be removed? All valid questions, but sounds political to me.
Like way to shut down shit tons of conversation.
THIS ISN’T A DISCUSSION COMMUNITY! IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE OPEN ENDED QUESTIONS. MOST POLITICAL DISCUSSIONS AREN’T OPEN ENDED.
Seriously? You’re this pedantic on the word discussion? Ok I will amend my first comment to:
We just had probably the most consequential election of our life and you want to ban
discussionquestions and the resulting discussion in the comments?Jeez all over again.
Most questions are “How screwed are we?, How did we fuck up this bad? Why are the Republicans so dumb?”. Like, these aren’t the types of questions this community was meant for bruv. And don’t act like you don’t know that.
Then you make a rule “no low effort political questions”.
How about none at all. Go to [email protected] if you can’t help yourself.
It isn’t called ‘ask lemmy about anything other than politics’.
How does that disqualify US political questions from being posted here, then?
POST IT IN ANOTHER FUCKING COMMUNITY! IF THERE ISN’T ONE, THEN BE PROACTIVE AND CREATE ONE.
They don’t even have to create one, it’s there [email protected]
That’s not what I asked.
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Feel free to ask on [email protected]
Not ban, move
It’s not a book ban, the books just have to be approved before they can be brought in, and they haven’t been approved, nor will they be.
It’s not a book ban, it’s one particular bookstore stopped distribution of that book. The bookstore next to it prominently advertises that it sells that book.
Lol, I get it, I just find it fun to see all the traffic going to the comments of the banned post
