Is there a more politically and ideologically diverse alternative for Lemmy?
I know the real answer is reddit but I really don’t want to go back now that I’ve already grown used to life without it. I was hoping for Lemmy to be a viable substitute but it isn’t. I can see how this place is wonderful for the certain type of person but that person is not me. My experience during the past 6+ months has been a net negative and I’m pretty much ready to move on. I just don’t know where else to go.
I have been thinking about this for a few weeks now myself. I honestly don’t think there is anywhere on the internet. Everything eventually morphs into an echo chamber, and then an echo chamber of extremism. If you find something, please let me know. I’m so tired of being constantly surrounded by extremists on either side of the political spectrum.
I can’t tell if you’re the problem or if it is Lemmy.
I don’t think there is an alternative as of now.
However: I think Lemmy will grow. As of now it doesn’t due to the limitations of the software developers… Which is my personal little pet peeve. But it’s currently in the process of diversifying itself. New projects like Piefed and others are being developed to tackle the current issues and limitations that don’t get addressed by the Lemmy developers. I think there is a good chance that Lemmy is going to change in the near to mid future.
(And I don’t get all the drama and political arguments anyways. It doesn’t contribute anything to my life discussing world news/politics and it’s bound to be negative… I’d like some more nice personal projects, soldering electronics, Linux communities and maybe posts about woodworking or lewd stories. Arguing about politics is a valid thing to do, but also boring in my perspective and this place is full of it.)
One man’s far end is another’s centrism. I don’t think there are too many truly centrist places left because the Gulf between left and right is so wide the center is just a giant ball of contradictions or meaningless statements.
Honestly? It’s tricky to find communities that give you a spread.
I can recommend picking an instance that has a secondary alignment with you (for example, country/state), as they’ll tend to pick up posts in All that may be of interest other than politics.
(Though tbf, our instance still leans left on whole. Just not so crazily)
Lemmy is already diverse, you just gotta find the right instance, or multiple instances! The whole point of joining your platform to the federation is for visibility and control
there’s a couples sites out there that will show you which instances are federating with each other and you can see a trend of lemmy instances effectively creating echo chambers with moderate viewpoint dominated instances driving nearly all of it.
if this trend continues, the fediverse will eventually go the same way that the other reddit diasporas went so i’m also looking for a new place; good luck fellow wanderer
Yeah it’s hard to say. Fark? HackerNews? Bluesky? Tildes? You’ll just have to try a bunch and see what catches on with you. You’re welcome to try Lemmy again anytime, so who’s to stop you from a break from it?
I’ve been saying for a year, Lemmy and the Fediverse is specifically designed to be like a series of echochambers, since the community, the moderation and local userbase are designed all around that. Ultimately, you have the freedom to choose who and what to allow and block yourself.
Personally I think you are subjecting yourself to grief by interacting with hexbear and lemmygrad but I’m not here to scold or police what you choose to do.
I think one major difference that can make your experience negative is that posts on Reddit can’t show below zero, and people here use the downvote button more often because they have strong feelings on a topic. In my experience on controversial topics you would have various threads where both sides of an argument receive downvotes which is a sign there are diverse perspectives. You just have to live with and not be bothered by a negative score, it means nothing. Some examples:
Israel vs. Palestine narratives (Lemmy overall leans a little more toward Palestine but I’ve seen either get downvoted depending on community over the months)
pro-Biden vs anti-Biden (this is a very controversial one and sure some of it is anti-American propaganda and “both sides are the same”-type of sealioning, still both perspectives get downvoted).
Ukraine (this one is easy, you’re either on a community under .ml moderation or not, which determines the overall narrative)
This is all to say that the best way to get ‘diverse’ opinions on Lemmy is to hop around various communities, brace yourself for downvotes and just try to be genuine about it. For non-controversial content we all gotta do our part, speaking of which I haven’t posted much OC lately so I’ll get onto that soon in a couple days.
I keep post scores hidden so getting downvoted isn’t much of an issue for me because I won’t know unless I go out of my way to check.
The main issue for me is that I can reliably guess what kind of replies certain topics get and what is popular and what is unpopular. It’s kind of like having a friend who never says or does anything that surprises you. Why even bother asking for their opinion when you already know what they’re going to say.
I can understand what you mean. The prevailing narratives tend to be America bad, cars bad, capitalism bad, Linux good, on and on. But in the vein of how you assert that you don’t want people to assume what you believe, going into a community painting users with a broad brush is going to fill the gap with your pre-conceived biases, and that isn’t conducive to good discussion. I say give it a chance, even someone that writes along the lines of what you expect may still have a tiny sliver of something that surprises you. I look at some of the more notorious users like FlyingSquid, PugJesus, PP_BOY etc. and I’ve agreed with them and disagreed with them on various topics, even if they were in line with ‘the narrative’. Other users I attempt to converse and sometimes it works out while other times I have to stop at the 3rd reply.
I’m making an effort to be better, trying to curb the ratio of responses I do that have only memes and add more original thoughts or detailed opinions to my newer comments.
I keep post scores hidden so getting downvoted isn’t much of an issue for me because I won’t know unless I go out of my way to check.
On some conversations you might be better off seeing the score. Some people will agree in terms of a vote but aren’t going to back you up in the comments. I’ve had a few conversations where the comments are demoralizing and the score shows me I’m reaching at least some people (or vise versa).
Also, something I learned from Twitter and Reddit after engaging with people too much … sometimes the right answer is just to use the block button liberally and call it a day. Some people are not interested in discussion or good faith debate they just want to yell at people on the Internet and feel smart.
I had a person I bumped into saying (all of this paraphrasing) “the press has gone to shit” because of a headline and I was like “can we not be so dramatic this is a small website, surely a bad headline from a small operation is not a new thing” then they responded with “how many headlines do you see with X Y or Z even in those mainstream outlets? It’s all gone to shit.” I ran a few searches and found a rate of about 1 article per paper per year that met their alleged example… And then they said that was malicious compliance, I’d ignored their argument, and I wasn’t acting in good faith… Like mate, I just literally took 15 minutes to check your claim out and came back to tell you; how much more good faith do you want? That was a block, that person is clearly a total waste of time, and I don’t want to interact with their “doomerism.”
In a sense it’s a blessing lemmy is kind of small because blocking one loud person that has a lot of opinions that irritate you can go a long way.
The main issue for me is that I can reliably guess what kind of replies certain topics get and what is popular and what is unpopular. It’s kind of like having a friend who never says or does anything that surprises you. Why even bother asking for their opinion when you already know what they’re going to say.
I was definitely feeling this way a couple weeks ago … ironically the worst was the weekend my birthday fell on. It just felt like everything I came across was a hot take lacking nuance.
It comes and goes… Some weeks people can/will surprise you. Some topics… I think it’s better to just leave the mob alone and let them have their echo chamber.
Yeah I’m very familiar with the block button. Some might say even petty. My blocklist is around 600 users long.
I basically block everyone who demonstrate the incapability to have a civil discussion aswell as people that only shitpost. If someone posts something like “Fuck Elon” or “ACAB” etc. it’s instant block from me. Not because I disagree but because I’m not interested in seeing those kind of comments in my feed and I think it’s safe to assume that users who write comments like that likely aren’t interested in any kind of deep discussions or intellectual honesty.
It’s a blunt weapon and I’m knowingly filtering out a lot of valuable comments on other topics aswell but I don’t care. So far it doesn’t seem to affect the flow of new content in any way. Every now and then I notice a blocked person commenting something and I log out to see what it is and more often than not I’m satisfied with my decision to block.
Having a good idea what opinions you’re likely to see doesn’t mean there’s no point to asking. Certain opinions being prevalent is expected in any community. Any time I make a post, I can be pretty sure there will be certain kinds of responses, but there are typically some that surprise me also.
If you find that the community mentality is so entrenched that people are hostile or disparaging, just block the most offensive profiles and move on with your day.
I block quite a few profiles every day. That’s just how it is these days, when charlatans can convince millions of people to vote and vehemently influence against their own self interest.
Because there is enough people to drown out all the people being paid by political parties to post here and offset the upvotes they buy.
The DNC has dozens of paid people on this platform and Because a post may only get 100 comments the people being paid can make it look like their opinion is the popular opinion.
Bro if you think the DNC even knows what Lemmy is, letalone is teying to influence it, then you need to check yourself into inpatient psychiatric care ASAP. Give me a fucking break LoL.
Shhh, don’t tell them about the secret paid Lemmy posting jobs. I’m up to 45 Soros bucks an hour posting about fully automated luxury gay space communism a few times a week. Don’t ruin this for me!
Oh it’s still incredibly USA centric, at least as far as the content shared and discussed in English is concerned. The userbase just gets their biased talking points from Russian bot farms instead of US media outlets lol. I guess that counts as more global.
I agree and started putting effort into Mastodon. It took a week or two of filtering and browsing to find users and content but I’ve definitely found a more engaging base of content to interact with that is nice.
I was an engaged redditor who switched 100% to Lemmy and I do not feel quite satisfied with the comments and content.
I’ll stick around, but I find myself on Mastodon and using Ground News more often.
Btw I have comments in my history of how frustrated I was about finding content on Mastodon, but suddenly it clicked after I spent a bunch of time on it. Not a raving endorsement but ultimately I do enjoy it.
Another side note, I was looking for some top users to follow and some have 10k followers, cool. Then I find some federated threads accounts with millions and realize how small we are in comparison. I know why, and I understand it, but it’s truth that small user bases have less ideas.
I didn’t want my feed to be an endless stream of news or other languages. So first I joined a smaller server, with a topic I care about.
Then I followed a few journalists, and followed tags I care about like cycling, my hometown, tech news relevant to me, and TV shows.
Lastly after I had that base of content… I went looking for people. When someone posts something I like, I check their other posts… do I like those too? If he’s then I look at who they follow. Big accounts usually don’t follow a lot of others. This is endless but really gave me a consistent group of people who I care what they think and say.
Not easy but worth the time over the course of a week or two.
Also I watched the #followfriday tag where people lost accounts they follow and why.
Also, look at the top accounts lists that exist. Threads accounts have millions of followers so it’s a good bet it’ll be good.
While I see a lot of posts that would have this problem, at least the discussion are a bit more balanced compared to when the same stuff would happen on Reddit. So for example fuck cars is about the same in terms of posts, but here I tend to see a bit more back and forth and a balanced perspective on how the comments are up voted. On Reddit, any comment vaguely questioning the circle jerk will be down voted into oblivion and receive nothing but angry replies.
The amount of apolitical posts is a bit disappointing though.
Their world news community is a good example. They censor people that don’t align with their views, I’ve had comments deleted with no explanation. The kind of things that get a lot of votes there wouldn’t last on most other social media platforms, of any.
If you’re sincere I might go find an example, but in my experience usually people asking questions like yours are just trying to waste my time.
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