Why is almost everything on Lemmy political?

There's probably a correlation between people who are aware enough of reddit's practices and policies to want to switch to Lemmy and people who are engaged in or by political discussion.

Maybe if some orange turd wasn't busy fucking up everything from board games to airplanes politics wouldn't come up so much.

Hard to have a conversation without it when there's a massive tariff on every single product related to work, hobbies, and even just living.

Stick your head in the sand if you want to, but as a trans woman, I need to know when I’m gonna get imprisoned for existing, and never see my family again.

Sorry to make things political.

This is a time of political crisis. The US government is upending decades of alliances and economics. The right wing is globally on the rise, and that means people's lives are in danger. The environment is becoming more unpredictable and less supportive for humanity.

There's a lot of important political shit to talk about. If we were living in a boring utopia, there'd be less, probably.

Also, what do you even consider "political"? Some people will tell you that a story about a man and a woman getting married isn't political, but a story about two men getting married is. That's a really low quality analysis there.

Lemmy is mostly populated by intelligent people (include yourself if applicable) that fled reddit when the app crackdown began.

As such we talk and some of that talk covers the current situation in the world of politics.

If you don't want to see any there are plenty of subs you can use.

You can also do what I do which is block the orange turnips name so you don't see the posts.

Because shit's really fucked up right now and needs to be fixed.

You're like one of those people in a world war, "Why's everyone so political?"

removed, politics affects everything. And everything's fucked up. Therefore, politics everywhere. Wanna have it not be everywhere? Fix it then. Don't complain that everybody's pissed off about everything and act like you're confused, you aren't that dumb. Nobody's that dumb.

I don't want to be political, but the government decided that me existing should be illegal. So now me posting about fashion or makeup or whatever is automatically political now.

Life is political, and it leans left.

Everything is about politics now. I watch space, aviation, and car stuff on YT and they’ve all had episodes that start off with “I try to avoid politics but the tariffs/whatever is having a big effect on this industry so I have to talk about it.”

It’s so bad I avoid watching explicitly political content because it’s too overwhelming.

The world is political.

Lemmy suffers from the "alt-tech curse" in that since there is perfectly serviceable, normie friendly tech, for someone to come to the alternative you have to be not so normie.

Gab, Parler, Voat back in the day, Mastodon and Lemmy, bluesky, etc are all part of the same phenomenon of micro-exodi from established sites due to fitting poorly with existing moderation which, given the fact normies still use the sites, means we're always looking at extremists of some kind.

Whether it's the tankies on lemmy.ml, or the progs on bluesky, or the tradcons on parler and gab, it's always some group being told "if you don't like it here go make your own" and them doing it.

The problem is this makes these environments extremely off-putting to normies as every single motherfucker on each of these platforms has at least a Bachelor's degree in scaring the hoes.

The reality is, if you want normie content, you're gonna find it on platforms used by normies.

Lemmy is too niche to have karma farming bots reposting the same shit every hour, so cat videos etc are in short supply, and most of the people who do participate here have scary levels of politics brainrot.

It's the zeitgeist right now. The world is falling to dystopia and it's top of our minds in our communal ride down. But yeah, def nice to be able to disengage /engage with non-dystopia as needed to not go crazy.

You privilege is showing.

Whenever someone claims to be “apolitical”, or wants something to “not be political”, is because they are looking at it from a position of privilege where the status quo doesn't hurt or challenges them. They also can't see the oppression, hurt or risk that said thing exerts on others, minorities, or social pariahs.

Non-political is a mythical creature. It exists as a safe haven to lure the insensitive into apathetic inaction. Nothing is apolitical because existing as a human being is itself political.

Everything is political. You're just not aware of how the things you like are political.

I’m not against some political stuff but there’s so many circlejerk opinion pieces that get posted. It’s just a bunch of people posting stuff that confirms their own beliefs, which is no better than what happens on the likes of Xitter. It’s just a different kind of echo chamber but people are okay with it because it’s left rather than right.

1. Well, a lot of people jumped ship from other platforms because of politics. So they're gonna be here.
2. It's a time where politics are fucking with all of us, so it's topical.
3. reddit still exists and has a larger base, so if you want to talk about stardew valley, just by the nature of numbers that's where they're gonna gather.
4. There are a lot of "lurkers" here, not a lot of posters. Seriously, notice how often The Picard Maneuver, or Stamets keeps popping up.

God I hate to be the guy who says this especially because I am ABSOLUTELY being hypocritical right now, but you gotta be the change you want.

No offense, but if you are an American adult and don't understand why so many posts are political right now you probably need to be reading them. We are probably going through the most problematic power shift the world has seen in 100 years and if we The American People don't start fighting back substantially we are looking at losing most of our rights as free citizens.

It's that fucking serious.

Because you're not filtering by your subscribed communities.

Despite everything people here says, you're probably not going to get a community without politics

Lemmy was born from politics, grew from politics and the largest communities are about politics

Your best bet is to leave if you're sick of it (Lemmy is essentially stuck with politics forever) or get used to it and use some filters to prevent the worst

Block em. I blocked nearly every community about USAian politics and my feed is now quite OK. Also block people who make everything political. There will still be enough out there to interact with, trust me. I've blocked swathes of people here and still find it entertaining. Also, do your best to contribute non-political content, it'll help provide others something to comment on that isn't political (and of course block those that try to turn it political).

Also, do create multiple accounts per activity. A political account, a non-political account, a gaming account, a botany account, a bird-watching account,... whatever your interests are, make an account for it and curate your content. I have multiple and this is probably my most political one. Others barely mention politics and aren't connected to this one. Until lemmy or other fediverse software allows creating personas on the same account, this is the solution I find works best.

In other words, there is no real algorithm here that will secretly bubble up certain type of content depending on how you interacted with the platform. You more influence on your own experience than you know.

Everything is political

Because Lemmy's userbase was boosted by a lot of reddit banned people, and reddit bans people for political speech. I'd guess lemmys userbase doesnt represent a random sampling of the general population.

I would say it's quite literally because a lot of people who post on lemmy are intelligent and intelligent people pay close attention to the problems in the world aka "woke"

Saw a tshirt lately that said "politics is dumb but very important" lol

Well I would push for a gunpla and modelmaking sub, but... people all over the world are dying to conservative political stances and authoritarianism.

So, do we talk about building plastic models or the death of innocents? Some would say both, but many of us know it's hard to focus on hobby topics when it seems like Revelations might kick off at any given moment.

"Look what I made!-

PALESTINIAN GENOCIDE

RAMPANT FASCISM

"n-nevermind..."

This is a time where it's hard to be away from politics. I switched to all tech news after the U.S. election, and the tariffs are strongly influencing the supply and demand, and the convict is skewing crypto ponzi schemes in his personal favor which has a lot of influence on hardware. He has Musk that's trying to influence hard on AI which also impacts a lot of our hardware.

Can't fucking get away from it, really.

99/100 times complaints about "politics" is a someone taking offense at being confronted with politics they don't like.

But yea, if you like reactionary politics, Windows, or AI, Lemmy is going to be a bad time.

Yeah, it's pretty annoying. Best thing you can do do is sub to communities that don't have it. As an example, the linux communities are pretty big and low on politics.

It's always been political, you were just in a more comfortable for you political space. Typically you don't notice the politics when that's just life and your own values.

Politics is life. The days of being able to hide from politics were ended by Donald Trump. You may be able to ignore politics again someday far in the future, but right now, politics is very interested in you and any attempts to ignore it will be at your own peril, because politics does not like being ignored.

We're all kind of living in hell because of our disfunctional system and fearful countrymen. So we're just kinda trying to cope together by commiserating.

Politics need to be contained to their own communities. Propaganda everywhere (even if it's propaganda that confirm your own views) drive people away.

Political discussions online rarely lead to satisfying resolutions. As a result, political discussions bleed into everyday discussion in the desperate hope that something, somewhere, will magically make sense.

Similarly, when businesses have meetings that don't actually resolve matters, every meeting becomes a desperate chance to discuss things that matter in the hopes they'll be resolved, so then every meeting that needs to happen will happen during every scheduled meeting, even wrhb ostensibly unrelated. This continues until meeting culture changes and even overall communication culture changes.

It seems natural and reasonable in such an environment for many people (like you) to want to disengage. Why continue doing something that never seems to lead to resolution?

Lemmy was originally founded by political extremists who wantted a space for their politics (tankies.) Its since grown past that, but that inflence is still present in many ways, most prominently in the influences of .ml. On top of this, politics is something inflammatory (and thus engaging) that affects everyone. Because its both engaging and broad-appeal, its going to be something everyone talks about. On the other hand, many niches, aside from being niche are often less inherently engaging (IE talking about a finished TV show). This makes it very hard to get the critical mass needed for a community to snowball into relevance. This means that (effectively) all you're left with is the political communities and a couple niches that are broad appeal enough and have active enough users to be stable.

Because everything is political. We're in the position we are now because people weren't paying attention. Finding a place to stick your head in the sand ain't here.

The short answer is Lemmy has a theoretically near-infinite number of communities and no “engagement algorithm” so it’s up to us to curate what we want to see by blocking the communities we know we’ll never read, or, in some cases, blocking users that we can’t stand.

(Alternately you could curate just the comms you want and only browse “Home” communities)

If you want no politics there’s a number of hobbyist and nature-oriented communities, I’d start there.

This is a link sharing platform. Primarily links to news articles.

Don't conflate politics to reading the news. If you have no interest in reading the news, you probably shouldn't be on a link sharing site.

Are you subscribing to federated communities?

You have to take steps to do that. Otherwise you're left at the mercy of your home instance, which may have a greater proportion of politically-concerned communities and commenters.

It's because Lemmy mainly consists of hyper-frustrated leftists who treat it as their safe space echo chamber.

Idk, but I use Boost and added some keyword filters. Stuff like "trump", "musk", "israel", "slam", etc. And any time I still run across political crap, I either block the community or the user. Lemmy has been great now afterwards, no politics.

It only is if you want it to be. Subscribe to what you like and that isn't your will see if you only view those things.

Use scaled as a sort occasionally to see other posts in your subscriptions. I switch back and forth.

At the same time: the world is crazy now. There is a lot of push to take away things like platforms like this. People are trying to push opinions and people are scared.

Block communities you don't want to see. Browse and look for communities that aren't currently hitting your front page and subscribe. Yesterday, I discovered one that was right up my alley that I hadn't seen after nearly two years on Lemmy.

a lot of people here migrated from reddit for political reasons, so a lot of the communities have been set up by those who tend to view things in a political way. it also seems that the general climate in the united states, where a large amount of the english language content is made, views nearly everything as political, either caused or reinforced by american politics dominating most forms of media.

it also cant be discounted that there are certain users whose sole motivation for posting in any community is either bait or propaganda, which can spoil any community that does not have very active moderation or rules prohibiting political posts or comments.

Because the majority of Lemmy users are American and the United States is in the process of collapsing, or at the very least, steep decline. So it's kind of the primary topic of discussion.

If you don't like it, you can edit your feed to only show the subs you want. It's pretty easy.

First, That's what happens when you're living under a dictator.

Second, even in normal times, everything is political. How much you get paid, and how your boss treats you, and how banks work, and how the roads look, and everything else you see is the result of a political choice.

The choice to be on open-source, community-owned social media rather than corporate owned platforms is, itself, a political choice, and one that, in the absence of other focuses for discussion, will attract politically outspoken people. With no other core community here to focus discussion, everything will fall back to the things most people here have in common: FOSS, anti-corporate sentiments, etc., all of which are themselves inherently political topics.

Well there are a lot of factors, and there are plenty of Niche communities you could pay attention to more often, but the most overwhelmingly significant factor is that shits really fucking bad right now. Like yeah we all wish we could live in a in a time where politics was boring and not life-threatening but that's not how the world is at the moment. You just can't escape reality. But you have to physically ignore things to try to remove politics from your world. I don't even know how it's possible, everything is being touched right now by politics, everything.

Unfortunately the vast majority of us are not privileged enough to be able to ignore politics in our lives.

Its not. We have cat pics as well.

This post has a list of casual communities which might help: https://lemmy.world/post/2216085

All I can say is be the change you want to see. Submit posts, maybe mod a community. I'm doing !gamedev, and it gets political sometimes, like any career field, but it is what it is.

Maybe you want a Marvel community, or whatever. Find your interest and dive in!

lemmynsfw.world doesn't have that much politics ..

I'm subscribed to a number of 'magazines' and none of them have any politics at all. I peek into 'all' every now and again out of curiosity.

So, same as reddit - gtfo of all, and change your default feed to be what you want to see.