I came here a few weeks ago after many years of reddit. Altogether I find discussions I enjoy, however, the posts and comments noticeably lean, well, tankie (I didn’t know that term before I came here). It’s not that I am looking for an echo chamber, but I also don’t want to spend my time reading propaganda. I’m really curious about a lot of things outside politics, as well as the opinions and arguments of reasonable people across the political spectrum, but I don’t want to listen to the boring canned lies of fascists and tankies. I realized that people celebrating communist dictators trigger me, and this is something I didn’t have to deal with before I started reading lemmy, I didn’t even know this type existed.
I also notice that accounts created just a few hours in advance come from other instances to brigade political posts. Because of how lemmy works, I can block individual users or communities, but not individual instances. Is there an instance that could be a “safe space” from this kind of brigading and tankie spam? Or a way to use the internet to read interesting things now that blogs died and then Reddit became whatever it became?
Edit: Thanks everyone for the helpful and wholesome comments. Of course, some trolls/wackos showed up as well to say hi.
Are different communities/servers really all that similar? I kinda just assume that people choose a somewhat random instance when they start and stick with it.
Some are, some aren’t.
Federation though, is such that if you say something one community doesn’t like… well they are likely to come over from their instance and harass the crap out of you. Or if you random comment in their instance, they will lose their minds at you.
That’s what I did, because I didn’t know anything about how it works when I signed up. I guess the big ones near the top of the instance list are more random than smaller ones (reversion to the mean), but even there, mander.xyz users tone seems different to me.
Unfortunately, I think the same effect works both ways. The reasonable people you are seeking will mostly gravitate towards low-effort instances - after all, they are just looking for funny memes. They heard about lemmy as “reddit, but with fewer bots”. They have jobs and hobbies and friends in the real world - all sorts of reasons to care about anything other than the specific instance of a random social media platform they are joining. It is no coincidence that the most tankie users on the most tankie instances oscillate between posting revolutionary content and posting suicide jokes. It will be the rare person who threads the needle of “reasonable enough to have real world perspective, but obsessive enough to create and manage a curated lemmy instance for reasonable people.”
As a pretty middle of the road liberal with a few conservative or libertarian sympathies (but a lot of opinions about auto oriented city planning), I’m afraid we just have to wade through the muck until our communities appear via emergent design. Until then, I like the neoliberal comm.
I just like .world because it’s got a simple UI and it’s easy to use. A lot of the other instances are very convoluted UIs, and tend to have exclusive/extremist agendas.
So much this! Not everyone on Lemmy wants their entire life defined by political news. lol