I came here a few weeks ago after many years of reddit. Altogether I find discussions I enjoy, however, the posts and comments noticeably lean, well, tankie (I didn’t know that term before I came here). It’s not that I am looking for an echo chamber, but I also don’t want to spend my time reading propaganda. I’m really curious about a lot of things outside politics, as well as the opinions and arguments of reasonable people across the political spectrum, but I don’t want to listen to the boring canned lies of fascists and tankies. I realized that people celebrating communist dictators trigger me, and this is something I didn’t have to deal with before I started reading lemmy, I didn’t even know this type existed.
I also notice that accounts created just a few hours in advance come from other instances to brigade political posts. Because of how lemmy works, I can block individual users or communities, but not individual instances. Is there an instance that could be a “safe space” from this kind of brigading and tankie spam? Or a way to use the internet to read interesting things now that blogs died and then Reddit became whatever it became?
Edit: Thanks everyone for the helpful and wholesome comments. Of course, some trolls/wackos showed up as well to say hi.
There are lots of us around. You just won’t see a ton of the content they post or comment because the tankies and other extremists will downvote and report it to try and get it removed.
It sucks. I once was on a thread about trans issues months ago, that was so wonderfully empathetic and nuanced and graceful… I went back and forth and felt so much was shared and learned. But then it was brigaded by a LGBT instance’s users, who reported everything as bigotry and hate speech, and then the mods removed all the posts and all that was left two days later was just a ton of short asinine posts that reduce everything into a binary stance of ‘support lgbt always and forever or you are an evil person’ nonsense.
Which is to say, moderate speech that considers a plurality of views on an issue, or the real world complexities of an issue, typically doesn’t last very long on lemmy, due to the population of extremists who regard it as ‘hate speech’. Because they want to reduce every discussion to name-calling and bumper sticker slogans and false binary choices of being ‘for/against’ things, and a bizarre paranoia about everything being nazi or facist.
Lemmy’s pretty left leaning, extremely left sometimes. There was a conservative community for a while but it turned until a place to ridicule conservatives.
Maybe just start a new community, I think there are people here but a lot on here refuse to even tolerate the right.
Real life. If you want moderate, complex opinions. Talk to real people. Not the bots and shills that populate this place.
I know of no one who actually esposes conservative principles to me. pay as you go, rainy day funds, infrastructure investment, efficient social safety nets, rule of law (constitution and founding principles respected even seperation of church and state), middle of the road (balancing state power [regulations] and private power). This is a us centric view though were our conservative party has seem to have thrown out all conservative principles. I do see plenty of generally left of center moderate liberals (don’t get me wrong a lot of ultra left too) although again often presented nowadays like ultra left views. Folks who don’t want to see an end to all capitalism but want to limit wealth disparity and the effect of money on politics, have social safety nets like universal healthcare and equitable public education, sensible regulation, progressive taxes, efforts to limit global warming fallout, etc.
Probably because none of those are exclusively conservative values, they’re if anything, generally liberal ones.
It’s looking very much like exclusive conservative values are those of exclusion and prejudice.
today but its been this fall the party has taken over time. go look what teddy roosevelt did and this was not one of those congress just happened to do it during his presidency. He was fully behind and putting forth a lot of it. This is what they mean by democrats being right of republicans. you go back far enough and republicans actually had some stuff besides lower regulation and taxes on the wealthy. they actually were behind tax increases because of the pay as you go thing. Really nixon sorta started the fall even though he did some stuff that was do to pressure on him along with stuff he wanted to do but abandoned or reversed course due to pressure. Then you get reagan who through out a lot of thier financial stuff and that was pretty much the lower regulation and lower taxes on weatlhy were all that mattered. They still gave some lip service to things like moral stances or trump to get the religious folks on their side but even that is going out the window. its crazy when you look at the changes in the party from roosevelt to nixon to reagan to bush jr. to trump.
None. Because that would mean that humans on Earth are being reasonable.
Have you met people? People are the worst.
You want an online community that allows both the right and the far right? That would be ALL OTHER ONLINE COMMUNITIES!
We came here specifically to get our own forum, where the centre left, regular left and far left are all allowed. This is a forum for the working class, not for the capitalists. And you capitalists can’t handle the fact that us workers for once get to have a forum of our own.
Who said this is a forum for the working class? I have not seen this mentioned anywhere. Read the sidebar: this is a generic forum for everyone. I’m inclined to think you are making this up.
Why do you want people with extreme views (left or right) in your community?
I largely use Lemmy because it doesn’t tolerate conservatives.
It’s 2026. There is no such thing as a moderate conservative. They don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. They don’t deserve yet another platform to argue in bad faith on. They’ve gone too far. Every platform they touch turns into a cesspool of bigotry and garbage opinions they think should be taken seriously or they play victim.
I don’t want them on Lemmy.
The Dems/libs are “moderate” conservatives, and even that’s in question nowadays. They are the compromise.
Refusing to even talk to people on the opposite end of the political spectrum just makes you another perpetuator of the massive political divide. Do you actually think anyone’s had their vote swayed by someone who refused to even talk to them. You’re not going to bring anyone to the left by demonising the right.
There is no such thing as a moderate conservative
IDK, I’d think most Democrats in Congress this decade are moderate conservatives (stupid Overton window shift).
You’re not alone in this. Just keep blocking the offending communities or instances until your feed’s balance suits you.
but not individual instances.
You can. If you’re using a Lemmy home instance, as you are currently (lemmy.world), in the Web UI, go to your user menu in the upper-right corner, click “Settings”, click the “Blocks” tab, and then you can choose instances to block in a panel there.
If what you want is “I don’t want auth-left stuff”, avoiding hexbear.net, lemmygrad.ml, and lemmy.ml can help. You aren’t going to get some kind of ironclad avoidance, but that’ll avoid the great bulk of it. Your home instance is lemmy.world. lemmy.world is defederated with lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net for exactly the reason you mention (in fact, I see people who don’t like lemmy.world because they consider it liberal, which they don’t like) so you already won’t be seeing stuff from the first two instances.
I don’t think I’ve personally seen fascist material on the Threadiverse (though there are some people with quite broad definitions of the term), though there are or were some far-right instances out there, based on defederation lists. Most of what little I’ve seen on the Fediverse seems to me to be on Pleroma, though I haven’t spent much time on non-Threadiverse Fediverse stuff.
moderate conservative
The home instance that I use, lemmy.today, has one user (@DonaldJMusk@lemmy.today) that posts a bunch of Trump stuff and a conservative community, !conservative@lemmy.today. I don’t know if your definition of conservative and his match up, but maybe you’d find it to your taste; it’s probably the closest to mainstream US, Republican material that I’ve seen with much activity on the Threadiverse. The instance isn’t going to be just moderate conservative and moderate liberal users though. But, if that’s the kind of community that you might be participating in, I’d imagine that he’d like to have more users.
EDIT: My own personal take is that the long term solution to having people with disparate positions on what content they want to see, above-and-beyond use of moderated communities and admin activity on instances, is to have “curator lists”, where people can basically “share” lists of blocks/subscribes/votes or something like that, and other users can subscribe to them. Then you have a list that — for example — excludes or includes content on various grounds without requiring effort on a per-user-who-wants-curated-content basis. I think that Usenet pretty much established that killfiles don’t really scale well in combating spam and stuff like that, because there was never a mechanism to share killfiles among users. Anyway, today, there isn’t support for something like that on the Threadiverse. I understand that BlueSky has something along those lines.
I barely can go a day i the fediverse without my pro-peace socialist democratic views being classified as facism or nazi-apologia.
There are a lot of users who are ‘eternally vigilant’ and think anyone who isn’t with them, is automatically their enemy.
Wow, thanks, such a helpful response! I’ll try the web interface for instance blocking. Another sus instance I saw today was blahaj.zone. To clarify, I also didn’t see fascist stuff, I just mentioned it because I felt it important to point out that I also don’t want to see that kind of content. I guess I saw one too many “so you are not a fan of Stalin, you must be fascist” comment today.
I agree that blocking these instances will dramatically improve your experience.
hey, just so you know blahaj.zone is not a tankie instance, it’s an instance aimed at protecting oppressed minorities (it hosts a women-only community, protects LGBT+ users from bigotry, etc.).
I think technically the instance doesn’t take sides in terms of political ideology and is thus not a “political instance”, but the top community on blahaj.zone is vehemently anti-tankie, so I would say they’re the opposite of the people you’re worried about
You can read more about blahaj.zone’s intentions as a space here:
https://lemmyverse.link/lem.lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/14736607
First and foremost, blahaj zone lemmy exists to give a space for queer folk to exist, with their needs explicitly protected as the highest priority, and with a particular focus on the needs of gender diverse folk. Most lemmy instances are not run by trans folk, and whilst many are still inclusive, they don’t always prioritise our needs. Others barely consider trans folk, and react only to the most blatant of bigotry.
We are not a political instance, however political communities have a space here, as does any community that is actively protective of the needs of queer and gender diverse folk. Given the impact of politics on gender diverse folk, that means lots of dialogue and strong opinions exist, and as long as those opinions are honestly held, and not bigoted or exclusive, people are welcome to have and express those opinions here.
For what it’s worth, I am a member of the Greens Party in Australia. I have no time for the middle ground politics of the Australian Labor party, let alone the right wing beliefs of the Australian Liberal party. Yet a community of queer Labor Party aligned folk would fit on blahaj lemmy, because the parties ideologies, are not explicitly anti queer. A community aligned with the Australian Liberal party likely would not have a place here, unless the goal of the community was to work at actively challenging the anti queer policies of the party.
basically you’ll only have issues with blahaj.zone if you’re transphobic, homophobic, etc.
got it, thanks for the explanation. I know nothing about the content and the general crowd over there, but some accounts registered there were definitely brigading political posts over .world, and not in a tasteful way. I don’t have screenshots or names because I blocked them. I’m not saying this is the instance’s fault.
