Lemmy is more left leaning because the rights popularity seen on other social media are driven by bots that are not here.

I think this is a huge part of it. Occasionally I'll surf Facebook after checking out the marketplace. Last night I saw tons of posts about that "Try that in a small town" song with tons of people claiming to support it. Just post after post of people saying they don't see anything racist about it at all, and not a single one pointing out how showing videos of the BLM protests while singing "we take care of our own, try that in a small town" miiiiiiiight just be a little bit racist. Fortunately I usually only click on cat videos and the rare left leaning recommended posts, so I got to see one post with a picture of John Cougar Mellencamp saying something like "I sang about my small town without mentioning violence." The post had hundreds of comments....all deleted by admins.

Even when you try to avoid the controversy and hateful comments, the system is still designed to keep you doomscrolling. Positivity doesn't help that...

This is underrated. I actually close Lemmy a lot easier and more quickly than I did reddit, it's not hooking me with dopamine hits nearly as strongly.

As a result, since I know I'll probably just scroll for a few minutes at a time, I'm more willing to check in more often and toss a few upvotes and maybe a comment or two around.

Yep this is huge. I still scroll on RiF sometimes without being logged in, and I had only ever looked at the subs I was subscribed to until now. I'm shocked by how much infuriating nonsense is being pushed by the site.

And its so tiring to hear about all the time

Edit: and I don’t disagree

Lol right? "Right wing politics only seem popular because of bots". No, left wing politics only seem popular on social media because old people dont use it, despite making up the majority of many populations, and often times are the only people who actually vote in elections.

Leftism is inherenty tied to technology, especially new.

I don't know, there has always been a huge libertarian contingent of the tech industry as well. I'm not sure which is bigger. I hope the leftism.

I'd say I'm generally conservative and have been dabbling in alternative social media for a number of years. Some of the biggest Mastodon instances are/were right leaning. Gab.ai started off as a proprietary site and then migrated to Mastodon. Truth.social was always based on Mastodon. I've never been active on them because I don't like echo chambers though. I've never really had a desire to have my thoughts reaffirmed by strangers...

I would assume they're presence isn't felt in the fediverse because the concept of de-federating is working? Gab is likely cut off by others and truth social never federated with others to begin with. I don't think Truth ever intended to though, and really just wanted something they didn't have to build from scratch.

The only Mastodon instance I actually have an account with now is somewhat right leaning but it's not their emphasis. Even then I'm not too active on it.

Agree with this ,RW is having an elongasm on twitter while most of my lefties moved to mastodon

There have been many right-wing exodus from reddit over the years. All of them have centered around a perceived "free speech" issue, and they have always flocked to the most promising alternatives (e.g. Voat). Obviously Lemmy with its origins was never seen as particularly appealing for that crowd. This time the issue just happened to touch the left-leaning part more.

Come on I don't think so. Lemmy was a left leaning platform since the beginning.

I think it's a different political dimension entirely isn't it? You have left vs right economics, and then authoritarian vs libertarian governance. I don't buy into that stupid political compass, but the axes do seem accurate.

Grandpa actually votes tho

As a grandfather, boomer, white cis male, I suggest you might just be over-generalizing.

Do you think that's relevant? I don't see anything about either reddit or lemmy that makes it harder for right-wingers to join. I can tell you that America does not have a monopoly on the alt-right (AfD, Brexit, etc)

I'm keen to learn more if you've seen evidence in this topic. I wouldn't know how to investigate, tbh.

It doesn't to me. It's just communists vs liberals rather than left vs right.

It's more easily avoided.

But I am seeing 2010 style cringe new atheism though. It's never a good sign when those people are around, they were the precursors to the cancer we see on the big platforms today.

At least it's an ethos.

What's "Nazi Bar" effect?

Your problem is thinking your country right wings beliefs concerns the rest of the world.

yeah, the far left seems to be more of a problem here.

lemmygrad leaks regularly

If Republicans could read, they'd be real mad

That’s exactly what a Nazi would say!

/s

There was already a right wing exodus from Reddit. /r/RedditAlternatives was created during that exodus, which is why their pinned list of alternatives includes things like gab(racists) and ovar.it(terfs).

Don’t forget the classic, “You sure with insert political extremist group on an issue. At least my side doesn’t team up with them.”

Most commonly seen when talking about Nazis obviously. I’ve been criticized for supporting free speech on social media sites because obviously only Nazis would benefit from being able to voice their opinions without worrying about being deplatformed.

The right has moved onto other platforms.

A lot of people on the right who would post online have been banned from most of the left leaning platforms and have found their own places to talk.

There is also the fact that this isn't a platform as much as it's a framework that uses and open protocol. Right leaning people can setup Mastodon, Lemmy, Friendica, and so forth as easily as left wingers.

The biggest problem in general has been people treating Fediverse setups like traditional ones. Facebook, Twitter, Discord are all run by central companies.

Mastodon, Lemmy, Matrix, have the benifit of being usable as bases for people to setup individual communities for themselves and still have some networking.

For some reason both sides have adopted a “with us or against us”

I hate this. I hate that if you are not 100% aligned to a certain groups policies, you're pretty much the devil in disguise. A leftist Democrat that supports the 2A? You're a "hard core racist bigot conservative that needs to home someone you love die in a shooting to see how you like it!". Those people are insane. It's not how the majority thinks, but those that do are very outspoken and loud so they have way more visibility.

There are a lot of people (on both sides) that can see how extreme parts of their "side" are and are very self aware of those things. They'll call out their own side for going too far, being too weird, and saying unfactual things. Those are the people that you can have real conversations with. You won't agree, you won't change opinions, but the conversation is generally very informative and you're not getting pissed off at each other (or you do, but you still show each other a mutual respect).

I cannot stand those with the "with us or against us" mentality. They really need to GTFO. And they absolutely cannot say they are patriots and support America first and everything that goes along with that. Because our country was founded on different principals, people with different viewpoints, and we created ways to allow those various viewpoints to exist together. We WANT to have different viewpoints instead of just allowing one to flourish and grow to an extreme and heavy handed policy. If you support the "Us" part of that, we are ALL with us, even if our views are opposing and we refuse to even meet in the middle.

I like seeing things forbwhat they really are, so I consider myself a centrist. Both sides hate me they are so brainwashed.

Neither side has all the answers. Both sides have valid points, but these fools choosing a side stop using their brains to think for themselves, and just puppet whatever the rest of their cult is parroting.

Please.

i like you.

I don't think I'm all THAT left leaning. I just like to be told I'm wrong... I may have problems.

Surely you're pulling those age ranges out of your ass.

I've run into a handful on here ... but they're always downvoted to oblivion, and even their sealioning comments often get removed by mods.

Yeah, Lemmy has address to this by just having an incredibly glitchy algorithm (look at this post with five up votes from four months ago, it deserves to be on the front page). No one can game it because no one understands it.

It's completely natural for humans to fall into a binary thinking.

It's evolutionarily advantageous to fully focus on "the enemy", whatever that may be, and "the friends", our own family/tribe, absolutely hating the enemy while absolutely loving your family. It's what made it most likely that our genes persevere, if you give the enemy the benefit of the doubt, and they backstab you, you're dead, but not if you just kill them first/don't trust them at all in any way.

This concept permeates our society and you see it everywhere. It's always "us" vs "them". If your ideology "wins" politically, throughout most of human history that means you get to kill your opponent, while if you lose, it means you may die. So it's naturally almost the worst thing in the world for us if someone disagrees with us politically.

It's really amazing how almost everything about the way we behave is completely shaped by what made us survive in some form or another thousands of years ago. The only way out so far is trying our hardest to resist our natural programming and apply rationality, which comes with its own set of problems.

I don't know exactly what angle you're looking to clarify in that regard, but to ELI5 it:

There are two factors: targeted ads and algorithm manipulation.

Mainstream social media sites earn money from ads they deliver. The more people stay on the site and view posts, the more ads they see. The algorithm is designed to promote content that users are likelier to view, not necessarily content that they would like more. In practice, this tends to be content that provides some sort of shock value. That combination of targeted ads with clickbait creates "doomscrolling".

Longer explanation below:

The value that social media sites give to advertisers is that they know everything about their users. They collect data based on posts and viewing habits to learn things like income, hobbies, location, sexual orientation, political affiliation, etc. When advertisers buy ads to show on social media sites, they get to target these ads at specific people that they are likely to leave the biggest impact on.

But what happens if you want to increase the visibility of your (not ad) content on social media? A lot of companies use social media to bring people to their own sites/channels where they make money. In some cases, they can pay to be promoted, giving them an advantage in the algorithm. In other cases, they can manipulate the algorithm using clickbait (to engage users using the doomscrolling trend) or even using bots to give a false sense of engagement.

In recent major elections/referendums, there were a lot of ads and promoted content intended to sway opinions. People would intentionally be shown content to upset them, increasing doomscrolling and increasing their chances of getting out to vote against these things. However, in many cases, the content that people would see would be half-truths or outright lies. Because they were earning money, social media sites did not care about verifying the content of the ads they were showing.

It's been proven that Brexit, for example, was decided by voters who were manipulated via targeted ads and clickbait delivered by social media to believe falsehoods that swayed their vote. And in many cases, these lies weren't just spread by specific political campaigns, but actually by external governmental entities who had a vested interest in the outcome. Namely Russia, who had a lot to gain from a weaker EU.

Lemmy is not immune to doomscrolling and bot manipulation, but it doesn't have ads and, that we know of, does not sell user data. It's harder to be targeted here because the only thing people can do is try to game the vote system to make their content more visible (which is sadly easier than it should be). But all you have access to are people subscribed to specific communities or registered on specific instances. It's harder to target people en masse and you only have a single data point to target, namely people who like [community topic].

Sooooo, there’s a lot of truth to it.

Once a site is big enough that they want to cash in on it, they develop tools and ai and make choices that are designed to keep you on the site longer.

These tools and ai quickly discover that the way to keep you engaged is to keep you enraged. Content that angers you will keep your engagement longer and keep you coming back.

This is well researched and I’ll cite sources if you need it.

So what happens is that the ai, while it isn’t designed explicitly to show right wing content, will end up learning that showing that content accomplished it’s actual goal. It’s original goal being “Keep people on the site longer”

Right wing content fits a nice niche where it engages a lot of people. Donald trump claiming that he lost the election will enraged the right because they believe in his horse shit and that the election was stolen, and the left gets enraged by it because it causes unnecessary violence like Jan 6th. The AI loves that because it’s fairly universally enraging, and engaging most people.

Is manipulation a force?

Extremely is a stretch.

/r/politics is just DNC lib screeching and astroturfing. Nothing leftist about it. At least not since Sanders lost the primaries in 2016. That was the first major shift there.

As someone around before the Reddit diaspora, I disagree. It was very left leaning before with a significant population of communists and socialists. The Fediverse dovetails perfectly with the communist dream: not doing things for profit, but instead for the common good.

Since the Reddit influx, I'd say it's actually less left leaning. Questions to the effect of "why so many goddamn commies" were not common.

Good job! You did it, a real comment!

Lemmy is not representative of the general demographic of countries. Thinking it is will lead to a very narrow world view.

Not sure what you're talking about. Right wing minorities have also tried to steal elections. Trump is going to be indicted within a couple days for trying to use fake electors. It actually lines up perfectly.

Everything is political, my friend. Accept it, and be kind when discussing! (Not to fascists tho, they will exploit your kindness.)

You're in for a bad ride then. There will always be politics in some magazines/threads.

Then find another instance where you can be as homophobic and transphobic as you want

Discrimination is not a "real discussion".

Say hello to my blocked list.

They developed the software, they don't run all of lemmy. They run one singular instance.

It's open source, if you actually think this software pushes left echo chamber, you're a smooth brain.

How do you reckon the design influences this? What do you think supposedly enabled that?

What specifically makes it a platform designed to be an echo chamber?

The only ones not welcome are extremists. If you felt unwelcome you probably are.