Fediverse

@crimeschneck Personally I've decreased my Lemmy usage a lot due to its echo chambery-ness. I avoided the political subs since day one, both since I'm personally not a big politics junkie and because I'm not in alignment with Lemmy's specific brand of politics, but things also extend to other topics as well.

A lot of the enjoyment of using Lemmy is getting news/articles and seeing what people think, but even in the tech spaces the range of tech news is somewhat limited and the top comments are almost always in line with Lemmy's specific tech thoughts (regardless of my agreement, I'd like to see interesting thoughts/commentary, if I can predict the theme of what's said it becomes less interesting). Sorting by new did help a little, even if a dissenting but well thought out idea was downvoted to oblivion I could still read it - but the value of link aggregators to me is articles + strangers thoughts, and if all the strangers have the same thoughts then I might as well stick with RSS.

My 2c anyways.

Weakness.

Limited range of political views breeds echo chamber. In my experience, you can't really have meaningful discussion inside an echo chamber. Disagreement, compromise, nuance doesn't exists inside an echo chamber. Just that same idea repeated over and over again.

Gonna be honest, you can't have meaningful and nuanced discussion here. Everything is black and white. Capitalism? It's the worst thing on earth. Religious people? Those people are idiots. Don't YOU dare use Windows, use Linux instead. ALL cops are bad, no exception.

This kind of things makes me actually scared of recommending people to Lemmy. I'm sure most people are casual people who doesn't have extreme views on anything. Just some people who wants to shut their brain off and scroll. I feel like the echo chamber I mentioned will put most people off.

Going tangent a bit--In general fediverse is not diverse.

When you scroll, you realize most of the post comes from the same kind of political ideas, same country (USA), same beliefs, etc.

You can't spell fediverse without spelling diverse, yet I feel like fediverse is anything but diverse.

This needs to change.

The political divesity is less of an issue than the political ferver. Most people don't want to talk aboit politics. They want to avoid political discussions, and get upset when people do things as basic as pointing out that politics exists in their bubble.

The fediverse turns them off because it's loaded with politically aware and stubbornly vocal people, not because there aren't enough people playing apologetics for the ruling class

Weakness, definitely. The range of "permitted" ideas is way too narrow.
I tend to agree with most common political stances on Lemmy, but still I feel I'm self-censoring occasionally.

Many instances intentionally want an echo chamber. Posts and comments are often deleted even if they're not abusive, if they are ideologically opposed.

Honestly, especially recently I feel like this place has been just a big Opinion Bubble/Echo Chamber and as someone who values trying to avoid these types of Bubbles and wanting to see what other opinions may look like this has consistently been one of my Biggest Issues with Lemmy. Not to mention that making it really hard to honestly recommend Lemmy to outsiders

Maybe lemmy will grow over time to include more types of people.

Social unrest may evolve this network faster than expected, in particular ways that are not foreseen. So, in my mind there are two paths for lemmy. A stable growth or chaotic .

Edit : unrest in any country that has a lot of lemmy users if alternative social networks clamp down or are unsafe to use

I think it's both. I can avoid having to engage with cruel or shitty perspectives as often, but I also don't love spending so much social time in an echo chamber, it's not great for you.

I think echo chambers are really bad for a culture and for people immersed in them, but like not seeing Nazi shit is certainly nice

It's definitely a weakness. There is an entire spectrum of personal beliefs, but wherever you are, if yours don't align with the mods you get censored. Reality is every new users first week is finding out where they 'belong' and this both discourages new users, and creates detrimental echo chambers.

Mixed opinion these days often reads more like outright polarization vs balanced discussions.

Sit at a table with Nazis and you just make more nazis

There is a bunch of angry brigading here for any of a multitude of reasons, and that shear wall of vitriol thrown at people doesn't help lemmy grow.

On Lemmy.world it's a weakness. Your instance may vary

I guess it could be counted as a weakness as far as attracting new users go, but I think it's a strength overall.

It would be sort of nice if there was a stronger right-wing presence here, but at this point in our history, the right is overtly toxic. They've completely lost touch with honesty, empathy, integrity and simple human decency. Their entire identity at this point is built on hatred, bigotry and callous disregard for anyone other than themselves. They poison everything they touch, so the fact that they can't gain a foothold here is very much to our benefit.

If we survive this era of Trump/Putin/Netanyahu/Polievre/Le Pen/Modi/Meloni/Hanson/etc., then hopefully the right will reconnect with reality, integrity and simple decency enough that they can take part in a community without turning it into a cesspool of hatred and lies, but unless and until that happens, this place is absolutely better off without them.

For me, it’s neither strength nor weakness. I’m a boring old fart, I’m not here for politics.