I am not criticizing them, I’m just out of the loop.
That’ll be partly down to the communist and transgender coders who helped lay the foundations for this place.
I for one welcome our trans communist overlords
That’s a possibility. Since the platform started off on their terms, it’s harder to convince new people of opposing politics to join the community.
We might be able to answer the question better if you named the “other platforms” you’re referring to. It doesn’t seem like an unusual amount compared to, for instance, how much communist/transgender content Reddit had back when Reddit wasn’t as evil as it is now. (Who knows what Reddit’s like now. I haven’t been back since the two-day boycott over the API pricing.)
All that said, some of the communist content here is tankies. (That is, authoritarian communists who spout CCP or other authoritarian communist regimes’ propaganda.) Some of the Lemmy instances (like latte.isnot.coffe and lemmy.ml) are run by tankies.
That said, a lot of the communist content here is grass-roots anarcho-communist advocacy by people like me who ideologically lean that way.
Any evidence that lemmy.ml is run by “tankies”?
- They basically say they are, and also run explicitly tankie instance lemmygrad.ml
- Look at the modlog for lemmy.ml. Among other things, anytime someone has an opinion about China who isn’t Chinese it’s “Orientalism”
Yet they still won’t let me ban the fucking libs invading the instance.
Just take a look at the admin’s profile yourself. Plenty of interesting stuff if you sort by old.
Old? Just check most places on Lemmy. The amount of tankie alts is huge. They’re everywhere on Lemmy. I’ve only been here a month and it’s clear as day.
I don’t think the lemmy.ml admins have been coy about it.
If you go to the lemmy.ml home page, at the bottom of the right column is a list of admins.
The first admin’s profile banner is a picture of Mao. And the second’s profile pic is a photo of Fidel Castro. The other two don’t have profile pics that are explicitly authoritarian communist and I haven’t had the patience to look through a whole lot of their posts or anything.
Just a couple of Reddit threads (via libreddit.hu) on the topic: one and two. Unfortunately what they link do doesn’t appear to be in the wayback machine as far as I’ve been able to tell.
The Fediverse is home to a lot of young, tech-minded people distrustful of major corporations. The younger generations are more likely to come out as transgender due to greater awareness and acceptance of gender identity and dysphoria, and a decentralised, open platform is naturally going to appeal to communists, syndicalists and other left-wingers who don’t want some billionaire buying the next website they get comfortable on. And funnily enough, there are a surprising number of trans people in the tech sector, to the point where trans-flag socks have become a meme among programmers.
This seems like the most straightforward answer. But it doesn’t explain why people on the right haven’t come to the fediverse in proportional numbers. I know a lot of right leaning Libertarian communities, and for some reason they like cryptocurrency and FOSS but not the fediverse.
Normal people use mainstream social media and don’t care about the fediverse. They don’t even care that Elon/Spez/Zuckerberg/Google are changing the sites.
Extremists, trans people, and others who tend to get minimized, banned, and shunned from mainstream websites probably like the idea of the fediverse. Somewhere generally without administration that they can own.
Just like alt-right and Nazi types have the same thing going with Parler and Voat, it looks like the extremist left have made their home in the fediverse
This is the right answer. Of course marginalized groups tend to colonize new communities, because the big platforms, both because of their top-down structuring Nd because of the people who are on them, aren’t always welcoming.
This is different from Voat tho. Voat was explicitly made to be a “free speech zone” i.e. a “let’s say nazi shit because nobody can censor us”-space. The fediverse’s idea is simply not to be dependent on centralised platforms, it says nothing about the content. If it happens to be left leaning, it’s because left leaning people tend to care more about stuff like right to privacy and centralisation.
I just hate ads and want the ad driven internet to die.
That’s why I came here too. Then, it was infested with tankies. Been a strange experience so far.
I think that a lot of people forget that collectively all the english as a first language countries added together dont add up to the population of china or india. So the algorithm which doesnt discriminate based on language just feeds us the aggregate.
I try not to get annoyed at the tankies. If my government would fuck my life up and disappear my family for talking shit about them, Id probably play along too.
This is actually an interesting take.
And, I almost tend to agree. They’re awfully tough to digest, even with empathy. Their tactics are… bad?
It’s almost like an abused animal that you’d like to help. But, it’s such a threat that you kinda have to leave it be. Every time you try to feed it, it bites and scratches you,and everyone around you.
At some point, despite the empathy, you just let it starve.
“extremist left” is a bit much to describe groups of people just trying to avoid harassment and hate on platforms clearly careening to the right, with essentially zero moderation, that officially respond to inquiries and concerns with automated poop.
You’re right, too many of the people on the fediverse aren’t extreme leftists. We should radicalise them
I was with you until “extremist left”.
Kinda crazy how not giving a shit where someone else drops a duece makes you an extreme leftist…
Talking bout commies, tankies and anarchists with that, not LGBTQ
I’m an extremist lefty. I want to ban cars, force teachers to only use gender neutral pronouns for their students, seize the means of production, and abolish consensus reality.
People that are naturally drawn to fediverse tend to be:
- self-hosting enthusiasts excited to run their own social media platforms, which are tend to be big supporters of FOSS
- left-leaning idealists who want to get away from big corps platforms
- pirates (arrr)
So it’s not that surprising to see plenty of anti-capitalism and transgender stuff here if you consider this demographics.
Hey it’s me, all the things in this list lol
Hey me, I’m Dad.
Yeah but I’ve also seen a lot of supporters of FOSS from right wing people. 4chan has a big FOSS community for example. For some reason those types don’t frequent fediverse?
Why is there such a large amount of Nazi, fascist, conservative, Republican, and bootlicking related posts on other platforms compared to the Fediverse?
I guess that’s the inverse of the same question.
What a trash ‘answer.’
Yes, it is. You are.
Trans people and communists are nearly half of software dev. The other half are furries.
How dare you imply most software devs aren’t all three simultaneously
You got socks?..
Based off the amount of fury porn communities I’ve blocked, half seems very, very conservative. What’s the old joke, if a bomb went off at a fury convention the Internet would go down?
The more transgender related posts are mostly because 196 a very large queer and especially trans friendly subreddit closed permanently and migrated wholesale to a instance called blahajzone. If you look at r/place right now you can tell the absence of 196 by the fact there are very few queer symbols on r/place compared to last year where 196 and associated subs had coordinated artworks and defense campaigns for their flags. I’m pretty sure last time they managed to take over the American flag and force it to move to another spot on the canvas. Now there are two small flags and nothing else.
Potato - potatoe, tomato - tomatoe.
You see 196 as
queer and especially trans friendly
I see it as a garden of shitposting delights.
it’s amazing what you see when algorithms aren’t deciding it for you.
Idk but I mostly block all communities involving the former (but the latter doesn’t bother me at all). I don’t use lemmy to argue politics or first world problems, especially with people who are often incredibly hostile to dissent. I use it to post pictures of my beautiful home state and talk about gaming
IDK, I see tons of left and trans content on YT and Twitter, for example. That is because that’s the type of content I like, and the type of people I follow. I suspect what you’re noticing isn’t so much the presence of communism and trans people, but the absence of dumb shit.
Trans are bullied and socially ostrichized irl, so they tend to be terminally online. A lot of trans are also coders. They manage to find themselves in to pretty much every obscure techy social space online, they don’t got anything else going on irl.
ostrichized
I just want to take a moment off topic to say how much I love this new word (malaprop?).
The word you were hoping for is ‘ostracized’, but ostrichized is a fun enough mental image that it should be its own word too.
Now I’m imagining a mad scientist with a ray gun that “ostrichizes” people who annoy them.
Screwed up coffee order? ZAP! The barista gets turned into an ostrich. Annoying, pushy person at the door handing out pamphlets? ZAP! Try saving souls as an ostrich. Have a cart overflowing with groceries in the “Ten Items of Less” line? ZAP! Ostrich.
I was thinking of could be a great way to describe self ostracism to ignore problems, like the putting your head in the sand ostrich trope.
Your scenario is more fun, an ostrich raygun should be a weapon in a video game like Saints Row or something.
that’d be pretty wicked if they could turn into ostriches too
One thing at a time please.
Lemmy is a free open source software project. People into FOSS like the idea of something being built by a community to the benefit of everyone and not being controlled by any one person or company who could seek to benfit only themselves. It makes sense that their political ideology mirrors that.
FOSS and just programming and tech in general have an unusually large number of trans people. I’m going to be honest, I’m not exactly sure why. I can only assume because programmers are judged based on their code and not their appearance.
Jesus’s fuck I hope I’m never judged on my code.
Judging by this person’s code, I totally understand their socio-economic leanings and policies!
Tech doesn’t really self select for well balanced, socially confident, neurologically normal folks.
I’m sure those people are in tech and have success as well, but the stereotype of the “hacker nerd” didn’t spring out of nothing. The obsessiveness and desire to be right and know everything that make IT geniuses can also make those same folks really, really hard to be around.
People that are ostracized for their socially aberrant behavior usually (not always!) have sympathy for other outcast groups, whatever the reason.
And you’re right, too - writing code is sort of one of those ultimate bullshit tests - either it works, or it doesn’t. Computers don’t care about your pedigree or your appearance or even your personality. Nice guys who write shit code might have management or product team in their future, but they don’t usually write code for very long. But good devs are hard to find, so even the most straight laced companies are willing to bend a bit when it comes to talented developers.
My $.02, and worth every penny 😂
I can’t speak for everyone or say my response is the definitive answer. But I would say it’s because people actually feel safe discussing those topics. They don’t necessarily have to worry about being silenced by a corporation or like they will be censored because of how the fediverse works.
There’s a general selection bias in the fediverse, and the idea of decentralizing power is pretty communistic and also pretty beneficial to people who feel oppressed (transgenders).
Most new waves have a strong bias when you think about it. For example, crypto has a strong tilt towards Libertarianism and deregulation
Strange. I thought decentralized power is anarchistic. Kind of opposite to historical communist regimes.
You’ll find no shortage of irony in the Lemmygrad scene, I assure you.
Communism is defined as stateless. Karl Marx said that while a vanguard party may be a path to achieve communism, it’s not communist until the state is dissolved. Until then, it’s socialist.
I think it’s a mixed bag. While anarchistic approaches do lean that way (and there’s a lot more I need to learn about it beyond the nonsense I was told in school), the communist ideology also gave a lot of power to workers, but on the flip side, taking the approach of a centrally planned economy requires a concentration of power. So, the world is full of contradictions, I guess