I am not criticizing them, I’m just out of the loop.
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.
There are right-wing instances of Mastodon (gab, truth, and others), not to mention many Pleroma ones, as well as Lemmy (exploding heads, and probably others). It’s just that they get quickly defederated by everyone else for various valid reasons (usually hate and abuse, sometimes even child porn), so you don’t get to interact with them much. They just get stuck in their own bubble.
But they have. It’s just they are so hateful and annoying that sooner than later they get banned or defederated. So they drop out of the face of the activity pub. Since no single entity can use an algo to force their views onto all users (ads or suggestion algos) they never resurface.
And of course crypto bros hate the fediverse, it doesn’t let them force their ponzi schemes with ads or SEOed posts. And most people here were initially pretty tech savvy individuals, almost all actively hostile against nfts and altcoins. As for Foss, they only like that the software is free, the freedom ideology is just lip service for them, they don’t actually believe. Case in point, Oracle. Foss? Free for me but not for thee.
People on the right don’t see the issue with neoliberalism. They are mostly fine with all the ads based system and corporate making billions out of the datas. Neoliberalism tend towards fascism with time. They will prefer fascism to redistribute profits to the workers.
The fediverse is a different point of view. You can defederate if it goes wrong with an instance what makes the profits by ad revenue impossible or too small. The big corps don’t have a huge interest in these platform without profits. People on the right will follow these corps and the platforms affiliated.
On the left, people will federate. I recommend to have a good read about the fondation of the unions in the 19th century. People of the diversity will historically be on the left rather than on the right. Again, for the profits, the neoliberals will prefer to oppress you as a minority for the profits than to have social and societal consideration for you.
You ends with the people of the left coming to the fediverse and the right on corps social media.
They already have alt-tech, which had kind of a headstart on the Fediverse.
You don’t have to be a right wing extremist to be libertarian (small L).
I am here and a big supporter of OSS, but many would call me right wing. I support living your life how you want privately and acknowledging different identities and sexualities, because if you aren’t flaunting it, how would I even know? But I also feel that sex, intimacy, etc should be private and should not be something discussed or displayed so openly, regardless of orientation, so many would label me as conservative.
As long as your definition of keeping those things private includes heterosexual couples holding hands, giving each other a kiss, or showing off their pregnancy or kids.
You (and probably I) are going to get downvotes for this, but this is as reasonable a take as I’ve seen from any “conservative” so far. As long as you’re not actively promoting legislation to curtail or ban consenting adults from privately expressing their love for others in the ways they feel most comfortable. I hope you’re not against gender-affirmation therapies.
The issue I have with this is that publicly expressing their love for others is an extremely natural and normal thing to do. Talking openly about your opposite-gender spouse, kissing or holding hands with your partner, going out for a nice date - whatever. These are all totally normal things which people won’t blink at when a heterosexual couple is doing it, yet LGBT people can still be discriminated against for these behaviours. That’s not even getting into trans or gender-non-conforming people, who can be discriminated against simply for existing and presenting the way they do.
I don’t just want to ensure that LGBT people are free from explicit legislative discrimination. I want them to be free from social discrimination as well. Social consequences for being publicly gay are not acceptable, even if people aren’t in favour of more open forms of discrimination.
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I’d argue the ‘young’ though. Polls I’ve seen, seem to show a huge 30-40 demographic.
Ya, most young people I know that are not in tech are terrible with tech. They have only experienced EZmode and need shit put on a silver platter.
i think that’s why the fediverse is doomed to perpetual obscurity. my reddit-refugee addictions have taught me that only reddit has the content that i like and that i need to learn how to appreciate stuff i don’t like to get my fix; i wonder how people get started on furry stuff. lol
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
They’re 90% of FOSS development. Also, their “daily driver” is an old thinkpad running linux – often Arch.
I use Arch btw
How dare you call me out like that
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?
Somehow I haven’t heard of that one lol
I feel so out-of-place, being a regular run of the mill gay dude.
You got socks?..
uwu
GNU+UwU
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It’s more a Venn diagram which includes trans furries, communist furries and the elusive trans communist furry which has only been theorised to exist.
I have proof they exist, there you go
Oh I hate myself for doing this but…
*elusive
Changed it.
How did you spell it before? Btw, is there a comment history function on Lemm like there is on Twitter Blue?
My head canon is that it was “exclusive” before. That just tickles my jimmies.
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
Reddit is living in 2010 while we’re out here building fully automated luxury trans space communism.
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.
A big part is because things like the Fediverse are aligned with the goal of Communists. Do away with the profit motive and constant rat race so we can spend time doing and making great things.
Imagine if Facebook wasn’t interested in ad revenue and data gathering but truly sought to keep people connected and to facilitate communication. No bullshit algorithm, no manipulation to keep people doom scrolling.
On a technical level, federation is arguably just as compatible with libertarianism. Each instance is its own island nation, free to set its own rules while members vote with their feet in free association. That it hasn’t gone that route is more to do with the founding population than the technology.
Ya, the tech interests me. It feels like a version of the earlier internet where private forums and webrings were the norm. I like the native support for blocking things I don’t care to see as well.
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it’s amazing what you see when algorithms aren’t deciding it for you.
Maybe it’s that homophobia and transphobia are so dominant on more popular platforms that there is a natural migration towards more free and liberal platforms. I always wondered why you see more and more racism, hate and such degeneracy the larger a platform becomes.
I think it’s because leftists are, as a group, a lot less toxic and hateful. They are happy to be a tiny community chatting with each other about being a trans furry communist all day every day.
The right on the other hand are, as a group, a bunch of anti social losers who thrive on hating and complaining about stuff. That’s not a sustainable platform because it’s either a miserable experience or it gets shut down for hate speech so they migrate around and attach themselves to heathier communities and complain about those instead.
leftists are, as a group, a lot less toxic and hateful
Definitely not my experience
I’ll just guess you got shunned or worse criticized for expressing overt bigotry.
I am not a bigot, so I find that extremely unlikely.
Generally it’s because I like capitalism.
leftists are, as a group, a lot less toxic and hateful
Ahaha! Hate is the core principle of Marx’s manifesto.
lmao here, you should probably read it https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/index.htm
I read it, thanks.
Ahaha! 🤣🤣🤣
Counterpoint. There’s a lot of furries and trans people on 4chan.
4chan has trans furry Nazis, arguably the most diverse group in existence.
It’s because when platforms get large enough Nazis (not metaphorical ones, actual 1488 self described National Socialists) start targeting them for recruitment purposes.
If you know where to look you can see them organize in real time.
The issue I have with this is that publicly expressing their love for others is an extremely natural and normal thing to do. Talking openly about your opposite-gender spouse, kissing or holding hands with your partner, going out for a nice date - whatever. These are all totally normal things which people won’t blink at when a heterosexual couple is doing it, yet LGBT people can still be discriminated against for these behaviours. That’s not even getting into trans or gender-non-conforming people, who can be discriminated against simply for existing and presenting the way they do.
I don’t just want to ensure that LGBT people are free from explicit legislative discrimination. I want them to be free from social discrimination as well. Social consequences for being publicly gay are not acceptable, even if people aren’t in favour of more open forms of discrimination.
Why is there such a large amount of Nazi, fascist, conservative, Republican, and bootlicking related posts on other platforms compared to the Fediverse?
Ad revenue is proportional to engagement; outrage drives repeat engagement.
I guess that’s the inverse of the same question.
I think that’s their point.
And I believe it’s because outrage and hate drive engagement and that’s essentially the point of of social networks as they are really just fronts for ads.
What a trash ‘answer.’
Yes, it is. You are.
I find myself to be a stereotypical Lemmy user. I’m trans, (anarcho-) communist, a programmer and Linux engineer.
I’m older, I transitioned (ugh I hate that word) about 2 decades ago. I got into computers consciously and very intentionally. I knew I’d need to support myself soon and spent a good amount of time thinking what industries or companies might be willing to hire someone like me (this was even before trans people had employment rights in California!). I chose computers because I felt like it was an industry where someone might hire me, I could make enough to survive and pay for surgery, and because it seemed one where my co-workers would be less likely to beat me up or kill me.
When it comes to communism, I have a hunch that being trans forces you to think about society and why you are not accepted, who is causing your troubles and why. It seems apparent why someone so low on the social acceptance ladder as a trans person would be repelled by exploitation based zero-sum systems and attracted to systems that would allow them to survive and thrive.
Linux seemed just fundamentally awesome to me. You mean people could just choose to get together, coordinate, and build one of the most complex things to exist on the planet and give it away for free? Sign me up! I think Lemmy and the Fediverse are attractive for similar reasons.
Thanks for this. It was very well-reasoned, and gave me a perspective I hadn’t thought of before.
Yeah, that’s the reason. Trans girls just often happen to be good at IT and leftist.
I was going to say because Linux is a big community on lemmy. And as we all know, Linux users are all either trans or femboys. /s
I transitioned (ugh I hate that word)
Slightly off topic but I’m curious, why do you hate that word and is there different wording that you’d prefer?
Not the person you’re replying to, but my guess is that “transition” implies some sort of inner journey, but transitioning is often really about changing how the world views you. You’re still the woman, man, or non-binary entity you always were, you’re just making changes to encourage/force everyone else to see you the same way.
This makes sense, transition also implies I changed from one thing to another, which is how it appears externally I suppose but for me it was more like being let out of a prison where personal expression suddenly became possible. I didn’t change so much as people just started being able to seeing the whole me for the first time.
I’m not sure, I just cringe every time I have to say it. I guess it’s just kinda like referring to one’s puberty as “blossoming” and feeling cringe when talking to friends and you’re like, “…before I blossomed …”. In that case you’d more likely say “when I was a kid”, but I don’t want to say “when I was a dude” lol.
It’s just a personal thing, no issues with the word or those who use it/like it. I don’t have a word I prefer.
Makes sense, thanks for elaborating :)
Why do you think communism would allow you to thrive?
Seriously, take a look at the history of communist countries and tell me which one you think you would have looked to exist in as a trans person 🤣
You’re conflating communism with authoritarianism.
Unregulated capitalism causes more harm than any other form of government not appropriately regulated. It’s worth more thought if you find yourself actively against it. We’ve been indoctrinated hard.
Communism = authoritarianism.
I notice you didn’t answer my question either.
So far communism had only been tried in small groups (where tribal dynamics make it work) and in Soviet and Chinese authoritarian regimes
Communism ≠ command economy
Communism ≠ authoritarianism
Communism = a broad selection of idiologies more or less agreeing with the idea “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”
Several countries have such strong socialist policies in place that they could reasonably be called communist if we didn’t pretend that capitalism was opposite to and incompatible with communism. Capitalism is an excellent technology for extracting from each according to their ability.
“Full communism” where you strive for perfect equality is probably less bad than “full capitalism” where you strive for full freedom of capital. Enough capitalism that you have the incentives it supplies and enough communism that those who won’t or can’t work are paid enough to live healthily and be in a position to seek work if they wish to, seems to be a good and reasonable position.
I’ll answer the other part for the parent comment too
If they fail to fit in to normal culture at work and are so unsuccessful at working, communism gives them a safety net.
- They could have taken a risk and selected a job they expect to enjoy rather than one that will accept them if there’s a safety net
- they could have selected a job they might enjoy rather than one calculated to pay enough to save for gender reassignment surgery if the state would pay for the surgery
- they could have had the surgery earlier (which makes it better) if the state paid for it
It’d be fantastic evidence if we could actually look at documentation of how these small group trials have worked out. Honestly, it’s the first I’m hearing of them.
I don’t understand the word “paid” appearing in your third bullet point. Wouldn’t a communistic society operate without money? Generally speaking, what would a doctor’s motivation be to get 11+ years of medical school + residencies, then perform a difficult operation on a patient that has potential for complications and blame? (In a capitalist society, the motivation would be “Helping people” plus “Money”, tied with hospital-level protections against malpractice suits, but I’m curious about your answer)
Wouldn’t a communistic society operate without money?
You could have communism with money. People still need a way to allocate resources and barter. I’m out of my depth here, as I’m a socialist but not a communist. However, I recognize that communism isn’t the bogeyman US propaganda (in schools, media, culture) taught me to think of it.
To give you the less complicated answer, communism is an economic system, not a form of government. Communism can and has been authoritarian, but it can also be libertarian or anarchistic. There’s nothing inherently authoritarian about an economy without money and without classes, based on need. It’s just the ideologies that want to (or say they want to) implement it in authoritarian ways that got to run the more famous socialist experiments. If you want to see how non-authoritarian communism worked, there are also historical examples of it, they’re just smaller and lasted less.
Answering your question - in the period where most countries that called themselves communist existed, no capitalist countries accepted trans people either. But you are a capitalist nonetheless no? Huh, I wonder why.
Ahhh, yes, the good old anarchocommunism, also known as bigotry 😆
Care to explain buddy?
Kinda sounds like you dont know what your talking about.
Did you confuse it with “anarcho-capitalism”?
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”?
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.
- 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.
Honest question, why isn’t your clubhouse over at lemmygrad enough?
have you considered sodding off to an instance where being a lib is a bannable offense
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.
If you’re left wing, it’s a pretty good space. I don’t see left wingers complaining to be honest.
The only evidenced complaint about censorship of criticism of China, was full of misleading bs that deserved to be removed to keep the community free of cancer. I’d have made an account there first, but they weren’t allowing registrations at the time Sync for Lemmy went down which is when and why I came here.
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.
Hey me, I’m also 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?
Well, if you look at Mastodpns history they definitely tried but servers like Gab shut down the Federation eventually because they where almoat entirely isolated really quick and efficiently by basically all other instances. I think those things have a lasting effect and could definitely be part of the reason.
@nodsocket@lemmy.world to add to this comment, there’s this video explaining what happened with Gab.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZoASOyfvGQ
Because the people that flock to these platforms first are usually technically adept nerds and free thinkers.
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.
Right? I’m pretty straight as these things go but didn’t know I needed that much queer shitposting in my life.
💩🌈 💩🌈 💩 🌈
i can vouch for that as someone who participated this year. even maintaining a bunch of barcode flags on the canvas near the painting frame was difficult because of how little people we had.
There aren’t nearly as many right wingers and fascists as social media makes you believe. Speaking as a Mastodon instance admin, every single time we’ve had huge waves of bot and/or troll signups they’ve been very clearly right wing accounts (almost all had similar bios) that almost immediately started interacting with and boosting each other as well as harassing trans and queer people.
The thing about the fediverse is that it can’t be manipulated the way centralized social media can. So what happens is that it gets handled very quickly. They get banned and their instances get defederated so all they can do is shout into the void. They’re not, nor have they ever been, the majority by any stretch of the imagination, and most people have absolutely no desire to hear what they have to say at all.
On top of that, a huge number of them are grifters, and they won’t get any engagement here. They can’t get the kind of viral outrage they need because most people aren’t even seeing their posts.
stares in “12% of Greek voters choosing blatant facist parties”
Same problem in Germany (just worse) right now, but we should still remember that 12 or even 20% are far from the majority. They are very good at shouting so loud that you could think there are more, but there aren’t. They only have as much power as we give them.
I was talking about social media specifically.
25% of any population is pure lunatics.
Another 25% are just dumb as rocks.
Then you got about 35% of average decent people.
Then you have 10 % of just awesome people.
5% rich sociopaths
10% other
So 110% total?
Clearly I’m in the dumb as rocks camp 😂
What are the “other”?
Ever have a weird uncle who smoked too much weed, worked for Microsoft in the 80s, and/or taught you how to play D&D?
That old rich sociopath? What about him?
Immediately thought of this:
I wonder how long it’s gonna take for the elites to start trying to pull a Conservapedia on the Fediverse? Cause, you know, all that engagement with non-conservative ideas can’t be organic, right? It’s clearly manipulated by the cabal or something, and we gotta have BaLaNcE.
in a word, intersectionality. you’re getting people who were already looking for an excuse to ditch reddit and twitter, and of that group, you’re selecting the ones with the most tech literacy. That tends to overlap people with progressive politics.
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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.
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.
It really seems like all “free speech” social sites are really just places for racism to flourish.
the most universal and common limits to free speech that people will come across on social media in the west are usually an iteration of ‘don’t be an asshole’
social media censorship is usually relatively lax on other fronts, and various sites will censor different things, whereas most every site will have basic enforcement of ‘don’t be an asshole’ rules
as a result the most crying about free speech will come from folks who got told off for being an asshole and are entirely incapable of getting over it
I don’t think “free speech” and “don’t be an asshole” are incompatible. I do mostly agree with your take, there different flavors of asshole that are more tolerated than others though.
“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
What you describe is exactly what extremist left is. Antifa means nothing less then being against facism. Who isn’t except of facists?
i dont see how they implied any if the above to be “extremist left”
it seems like you read “extremist left”, assumed it was referring to you and then got upset about it referring to you
-
it doesn’t apply to me, I don’t care if you think it does
-
if you’re unable to understand implied context, that’s your issue, not mine
i missed extremist left in the end of the sentence, you are correct
-
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…
I mean, if it’s in the middle of my living room…
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.
Hell, I’m a centrist conservative and I want to ban cars and abolish consensus reality.
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I’m a socialist / communist, please don’t lump us in with those others.
My assumption is that the bots, shills, astroturfers and other corporate interests haven’t arrived in sufficient quantities yet.
It’s not that there’s more here, just the volume of noise out there is far greater and most of the content generated is for parties who gain no advantage from posing as part of either of those communities.
