Why is almost everything on Lemmy political?
I joined Lemmy a few days ago and have been reading around. 90%+ of the content I see, even on non-politics related communities, is political in some way. I have no interest in that, so it’s tiring, especially when it’s inserted in the comments of completely unrelated posts.
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.
Not to mention almost everything is political these days...
Like, the root cause of most our issues are political and there's a lot of issues. So it shouldn't be surprising most topics are tied back to it.
Yes, Lemmy is probably 60% people who were banned from Reddit for being overly political.
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.
It really is tough to talk about anything else, and even when you do talk about it, it's more of an exasperated sigh than a conversation.
In times like this, ‘anti-politicals’ would cry that even talking about LIVING is too political for them. Politics is living, folks, get off your armchair with your heads in the sand and take a look outside. Shits fucked up right now, and talking about how fucked up it is isn’t too ‘political’. Not talking about ‘politics’ is ignoring the world around you and how it affects the every day person.
Exactly this. Sure it is exhausting, but it is necessary. Even more so with this current administration.
It's not like tariffs are going to disappear only if people talk about them 24/7.
Not expending all your mental energy in thinking about it and just enjoying life, hobbies and other topics is probably one of the best things you can do. Why do you think orange guy makes the statements he make. It's not because he is stupid (even if you want to think he is stupid) is because he knows his opposition gets triggered by it. And if you are constantly thinking about it you'll destroy your mental health and the mental health of those around you. Exhaustion is their goal.
I'm luckily not American, but I've gone through my share of idiotic rulers. And my best advice is not letting your life to orbit around them. They will come and go, but the years you lose thinking about them all the time don't come back. Talking to Americans nowadays is disheartening seeing how many stress people are taking and how they move into more stress instead of trying to disconnect and move away from it.
Just live life.
The problem is that they're actively impacting your ability to participate in many hobbies, or eating up funds on necessities that force you to forgo other things entirely. It's not that we're just repeating "tariffs bad" when talking about them, it's that they're actually factoring into decisions being made in order to live our life.
I was on a discussion board for anime figurines and people started posting screenshots of their order checkouts showing tariffs nearly doubling the cost of their order. That caused a conundrum because people started talking politics and that's not allowed according to the board rules. But what are people supposed to do? Can they talk about increased prices or is that political? Do they just have to pretend prices have skyrocketed for no reason at all? Can they even mention prices are higher than before?
If you don't restrict things then you're allowing discussion of politics. If you do restrict things then you're preventing normal discussion because of politics. It's unavoidable.
Even something as simple as suggesting "Hey, these figures are made in Vietnam instead of China, so they're lower cost right now" is political. It is, as you said unavoidable.
Everything is political; how much you notice really is just a metric of how much a particular subject effects you.
This is such a great example.
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. A lot of ‘making everything about politics’ is the reaction of people whose very existence been politicized by those in power.
You wouldn't be imprisoned. That would imply due process and habeas corpus.
Enemies of the regime will be disappeared.
I'm not trying to make you feel bad. I just think this is where we are at the moment and I have a hard time not thinking about it.
They're talking about suspending habeas corpus so...
Regardless I still think they're going to go after the unhoused more explicitly and use less explicit means to push trans people (and others they disapprove of) into that category in order to make excuses for the disappearancess. We shall see I suppose.
Apology not accepted. You don't owe anybody apologies for that, ever. They should be apologizing to you.
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.
Can I block a term? How?
Some apps (e.g. Voyager/Thunder) and web frontends (Tesseract? not sure which tbh) enable keyword filtering.
In the case of the apps, it's found in settings under filters & blocks or filters, respectively. Unfortunately I can't recall which web frontends enable it for sure, but I do remember there seemed to be fewer of them that did last I checked.
Content Filters. There's are lot of communities dedicated to lemmy how to's and it's kinda dependent on the app you use where to click specifically.
lemmy.ca##div.post-listing:has(span:has-text("/trump/i"))
Put that into your ablocker custom rules.
Percieved intelligence is subjective. See this paper where 65% of Americans think they are smarter than average. The math doesn't add up.
Yeah, but like, I'm smart enough to know I'm not in that 65%, because I'm smarter than average.
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.
Thats not politics. That's news.
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.
Everything is political. Always has been. Only difference is people's money is getting affected so it's unignorable. Mind you when it's racism, sexism, oppression, genocide it's all ignorable. But God forbid you get in the way of people's money.
Yes I agree that the world is terrible and we will all die angry and frustrated because these psychotic apes can’t just get along.
I predict a huge leftwing shift among apolitical people since it's bleeding into things people who don't read the news experience
The world is political.
Especially now.
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.
Semi-related, this is what happened to onlyfans. It was basically the exact same concept as patreon, the only difference being that NSFW stuff was allowed. The result is it became ONLY PORN.
Correct! In general, if there is tech A that does a thing for a demographic, tech B can really only hope to pick up demographic !A
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.
To be fair, most politics on Lemmy is US-centric politics. Second is EU-centric.
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.
It's embarrassing how often the first paragraph of the article contradicts the title of the post. Then you look at the comments and 99% of them are blathering as if the title is true.
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.
Nope, head in sand and complain through anis.
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
Filter out the politics, and join a bunch of other forums instead.
!WomensStuff@lazysoci.al is no politics! We're a trans+ inclusive women's only group though.
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.
Is it really so many banned people? I thought most of us were here voluntarily due not liking reddit policies. I have my reddit account, I just don't use it.
I’m in both camps. I made a suggestion that the world might be better off without Greg Abott, governor of Texas. That got me banned. I used an alt account for awhile until the API debacle and I haven’t been back since.
granted, it hasnt been measured that I can find.
I have mine, and frankly I still use it to read about college football and Star Wars and check AskHistorians and post about keyboards. For shitposting and actually engaging with humans -- yes, many of whom are my political speed or even further left -- I really prefer it here. I "left" during the Mod Rebellion and APIpocalypse when it kind of became clear things were not going to be getting better. If it dies, it dies. We got beans over here.
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.
or ai
Don’t tell dbshitter that
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.
A person could post a pic of the sky and somebody would somehow still find a way to insert a Trump comment. It’s a bit insane.
Just throw those people in the trash with your block button man, you have full power here
Coming from reddit it is pretty funny how well this works because those people commenting like you say are quite literally the same 3 people
And use block liberally. If someone makes me feel negative in any sort of way I will insta block. I'll never meet anyone here irl so it's the most logical thing to do
It is a bit insane, because the world is a bit insane right now, and frankly I think it's your fault.
Well, not you specifically, and it's not entirely your fault. But part of the reason tyranny and fascism have gripped power across the globe is that political discussion is considered impolite. It's offensive to point out how absurd or dangerous a political policy is, so we just avoid the subject. Wouldn't want to offend a conservative bigot by pointing out other people exist.
And because polite people avoid the subject, only extremists engage in the debate. Nuance is lost, and the crazies take charge of the nuthouse whilst "normal" people, like yourself, fret about people talking about the problem.
It would be fucking fantastic to look at a picture of the sky and not think of how air pollution is being deregulated, how Qatar is buying influence with the President by gifting him an airplane, how space is being monetized by a South African Nazi, or how we're all likely to die of an airborne virus because the person in charge of coordinating our healthcare response has a brain that's mostly worm poo.
It would be wonderful to stop talking about politics, but not talking about it has led us, inexorably, to this point. We have a duty to discuss ideas when they affect all of us. We have a responsibility to point out stupidity and ignorance and make conservatives feel ashamed of it. It's not fun for us, either, but if we were to follow your lead, we will end up murdering children in death camps. Which is exactly where we are.
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.
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.
I'm okay with far right people being driven away, actually.
Not everyone who doesn't want to talk about politics 24/7 is far right. In fact most are not. And people can disagree with you in some political points and, guess what? they can still not be far right. People be seeing far right in their own shadows nowadays. Stalin level paranoia.
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.
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?
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.
I find that I want some politics, and the politics that leaks into News and elsewhere is just about right. I un-subbed from anything specifically with the word politics in it and I mostly avoid .ml, and generally I find it very pleasant around here.
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.
Not true at all. On the other site you can curate subs so your feed consists entirely of puppies and pottery tips.
Abomination. That shit should be banned. I report them to mods.
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.
Merriam-Webster: politics
Definition 1:
a: the art or science of government
b: the art or science concerned with guiding or influencing governmental policy
c: the art or science concerned with winning and holding control over a government
And here we are on social media, where people in society communicate. StRaNge
It's because Lemmy mainly consists of hyper-frustrated leftists who treat it as their safe space echo chamber.
There's good reason to be a hyper-frustrated leftist in this shitty world. Not sure I see it as a safe space echo chamber though. Everyone is welcome to join and voice their opinion as long as they aren't being racists, bigots or spreading disinformation on most instances. Problem is that the right wing around the world only really has one policy, and that's being racist biggots who try to spread fear and hate while denying simple scientific facts and data.
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.
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.
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.
What’s kind of crazy is that almost all political content is about Trump / Trump-related too. From what I’ve seen Lemmy is very progressive (me too), but I see almost no news about progressive / left-wing / liberal things happening? It’s all Trump-Elon-Republicans. It’s like I’m in a conservative community with the amount of Trump content around.
there is nothing to feel excited or hopeful about from american progressives at the moment, so it is all cope posting. i am more disheartened by posts like the one that showed up the other day eith a link to a supposed story about a cybertruck owner who complained that he got laughed at by children. it is not news, it is not worthwhile, it has not enriched the lives of anyone who read it. it is an outlet to expend political energy for those who dont know what else to do. politics are unavoidable, and complaining about politics is natural and can be cathartic, but at this level it is drain that is part of a trumps political strategy.
Blocks Lemmy.world politics, news etc subs
Those are regime front modded by reddit type clowns who are shilling DNC talking points.
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.
I already had the others, but I am fucking adding "slam" right now. I should probably add a few others while I'm at it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
OP wrote that politics is bleeding into non-political communities. So editing to show non-political communities is not going to work. And by communities, I mean magazines.
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.
anti-corporate sentiments
Not on my fedi 🤣
Its not. We have cat pics as well.
We need more active guitar forums, but it's still better than Reddit has become.
And porn!
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.
It is a skill issue tbh and people need to be educated to avoid certain subs that just fucking endlessly shill DNC slop
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.
Politics affects every facet of life. Not being concerned with or effected by political shifts is a privelege. Just by moderators deciding what topics are and aren't policical they are enforcing their political views onto the community. You see it constantly on reddit where someone posts something innoccuous then the mods lock the thread and ban further discussion.
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!
Dude. Politics is huge right now because we're going through a tough time globally. It's a lot of people justifying cruelty and invasions.
These were the hot topics so that's what grew fastest. Remember that Lemmy is still kinda new.
I know that if I need an oura-/smart ring community I can either wait or I can start one. I'm not gonna start one as it'd be negligent of me.
What do you want to see? What do you not? Find or start what you want, and block what you do not.
this is what you get when the loudest mouth on earth gets a second chance to make everything political.