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I think a lot of the people on Lemmy came from Reddit when the whole API thing happened. It was pretty much a boycott. I assume most of the people who cared enough about that to leave were mostly left-leaning.
That's why I'm here, at least.
Edit: not sure about Mastodon, though
Reddit chased away the Trump supporters before the API thing happened. When it did, some people like me who are classic-liberals and libertarians also came over. After all, Lemmy is an inherently libertarian platform even when its users aren't. When I express a political opinion objectionable to leftists, I get several times more down-votes than up-votes but I do get up-votes.
Lemmy is an inherently libertarian platform
This is an interesting perception, because if you mean American libertarianism then this doesn't really make sense. Lemmy's creators are communist and intended it to be anti-corporate. It is designed in a decentralized manner specifically to avoid situations where companies can own and profit from it.
The kinds of platforms I would see as being libertarian (in the American sense) are the diaspora of privately owned social media companies.
American libertarian just means embarrassed Republican nowadays.
If it's libertarian it's libertarian socialist. There's no property or capital on here, posts get boosted by collective voting, not based off your following or account. There's not even an idea of karma, your account means basically nothing here. A capitalist libertarian social media would be something like nostr or what bluesky is claiming it'll eventually do where you completely own your account and your following and you can use that social capital as you wish.
There's only one way you can support Trump today.
You either refuse to acknowledge all the terrible things he's done, or you approve of the things he's done.
People who refuse to acknowledge, are going to look at all the "fake news" on this site about His Oranginess, and quickly decide that it's nothing but propaganda and go somewhere "more reliable".
Those who agree, stick around a little longer. They will argue and defend the horrible things, because they think there are more like them that will come out and back them up as a fellow defender of ~~racism~~ ~~misogyny~~ ~~homophobia~~ "Good old family values". But they will be downvoted to oblivion and have trouble finding a friendly voice. Eventually, they too will go where they can have a more comfortable discussion with people who are as terrible as they are.
And ironically enough, if you went to Truth Social, and asked why there weren't more Biden/Harris supporters there, they'd give you the exact same answer in reverse.
We had an opportunity years ago to fix this problem. Long before Trump ever showed up on the scenes as a political individual. We needed in schools to be teaching how to pick out real news from fake news. How to pick out fact from propaganda. Hell out to read a newspaper properly.
How to logically pick a part in argument. We chose not to. We as a society, decided not to put our money towards that. Now people read a headline, and based purely on the headline, make a statement such as “throw the guy in jail for the rest of his life for that one “.
I sat on a jury trial. It was a murder trial, if you went purely by what was in the local newspaper, you would’ve seriously questioned why the guy didn’t just take a plea deal. If you sat in that courtroom day after day, listening to it you’d realize this is a lot tougher than what you realize. we had a hard time figuring out if the guy was even in town at the time of the murder.
But for those that weren’t involved in the trial, they’re convinced the guy belonged in jail for the rest of his life. Because people didn’t sit down and really read the newspaper and ask important questions. Because we don’t hold our journalists to a higher standard and force them to give all the information And tell both sides of the story.
I have no idea how you solve the problem anymore. Because at this point, even if you tell the complete truth about any given politician, no one‘s going to believe what they’re reading anymore because there’s another so-called journalist out there saying the exact opposite and people say well I don’t know what to believe then. And can’t figure out how to critically think about this and ask questions.
Here in Lemmy we are guilty of the same sort of thing, same as over at truth social same as over at Twitter same as over Facebook.
As a society, I’m sorry for the language here, we are well and truly fucked.
I truly don’t know what the answer is.
Also sidenote 10 bucks says somebody comes back with a stupid comment of well since you don’t know what the answer is obviously you’re just saying that we shouldn’t do anything and just give up.
Reddit's early days were also far more left leaning then they eventually became.
When you have a small niche of nerds who enjoy discussing topics and ideas, then far right wing points will get downvoted to hell because they are, quite frankly, dumb, divorced from logic and the real world, and don't stand up to actual critical scrutiny.
Reddit got more right leaning as it grew and expanded into the general population and more dummies started upvoting dumb posts, then got more right leaning when right wing political orgs took notice and started trying to influence it, and now seems even more right leaning because they've changed their algorithms to prioritize controversial comments and posts that get people angry because it boosts engagement.
While very true, dont discount apathy and lurking. I may have made 15-20 comments on reddit for tge 10+ yrs I was on the platform. There were so many ppl 1. That typically someone else would respond. Two reddit descended into ppl who just want to argue semantics. Here without the karma farming people have more genuine responses
Over on mastodon on the other hand... I get the feeling people brought some of the negative aspects of twitter over there. Still overwhelmingly positive but I tend to get more info on lemmy now than mastodon Imo
Most likely your instance is defederated from all the nazi-adjacent instances 🤷
“Without echo chambers, the weak trump supporter gets bullied and humiliated, leaving defeated and confused back to his herd. Nature is beautiful. “
David Attenborough, maybe
We don't take kindly to folks who don't take kindly 'round here.
There are plenty of Trump supporters here. Every comment from someone who implies one shouldn't vote for Harris because of the Israel-Gaza war is likely someone trying to suppress Democrat turnout. Single issue voting is the only way the GOP ever win.
The Gaza posts always make me laugh because they completely ignore that Trump would just glass Gaza.
The only reason Trump hasn’t showed how terrible he’d be on Gaza is because he isn’t president right now.
They're here, anything pro trump is often downvoted, and most things heavily critical of the Dems are also often downvoted.
For better or worse, there's not a lot of right wing stuff that makes it into the positive on votes.
If you sort new, you'll see it pop up from time to time.
It's hard to tell sometimes, but it certainly feels like some political regimes are trying out dropping propaganda here or there into the conversation. I'm sure most of it is from genuine users, but there are some comments that just look like they're here to stir up dissent.
For better or worse, there’s not a lot of right wing stuff that makes it into the positive on votes.
That is for the better.
You occasionally run into some disagreeable but unobjectionable "traditional" conservative opinions, usually around economics and the governments role in it, but trump shit isn't that. We can be friends if you think a market solution is viable or better than an entitlement program. We can't be friends if you think a significant portion of your fellow citizens are vermin or that we should just let terrible problems continue or get worse.
The window has just shifted so far that literal objective depictions of reality are described as "left".
I like it this way. It's not an "echo chamber" because we do have some interesting liberal vs leftist discussions. I think I've already heard quite enough conservative nonsense though; they aren't entitled to my consideration forever.
There is a conservative comm on lemm.ee
It's a shit hole though as expected
They absolutely exist. But in general, I think most people here are informed and choose a wide variety of information to consume. That is exactly the opposite of most Trump supporters.
Decentralized network designed to stand up to big tech by gay trans furries. Not much appeal for those folks round these parts.
You haven't seen any of the "genocide Joe" trolls?
yes I think the bigger problem here is right wing propagandists masquerading as lefties.
They’ve all but vanished after Biden dropped out of the race.
you've stopped seeing comments about Biden once he became irrelevant?
Trump supporters tend to hang out in the /modlog community. Try there first.
They are, but defederation helps keep the echo chambers separate.
On DB0, we get both sides. It makes for a pretty interesting experience. I haven’t felt a need to actually block anybody.
There are a couple masquerading as Green Party supporters, and you do see blatently pro-Trump posters occasionally, but most of them are lurkers who, if they comment, hide behind criticizing Democrats rather than voicing pro-Trump sentiments.
Look for the people who were smashing Biden for the debate behavior while ignoring Trump's Alzheimer's symptoms. The people being nitpicking Harris or Walz, while being silent about the Couch-Fucker and Orange Stalin. Those are the pro-Trump lurkers. There aren't many, though, because they don't thrive outside of an echo chamber.
Lemmy's an echo chamber as well, but you'll find plenty of people who criticize both parties, and while a lot of people like Kamala, very few claim she's perfect, or worship her. And there's plenty of legitimate criticism of the Democratic party, and strong sentiment about a need for change in US politics. This is the sort of discussion and debate which would not be sanctioned in most conservative forums, and could easily get you banned. So I think it's fair to say Lemmy is far less echo-y than most.
I think that your metrics for picking covert Trumpers based upon that appaling debate is incorrect and simplistic. I watched every second of that shit show and believed that we were doomed for another 4 years of the orange turd.
Trump lied during the debate. Some estimates were that he lied upwards of 250 times in his 45 minutes at the mic. Those numbers seems off, but who knows? I don't know the true figure, but it was insane. However, it is also not the fucking point. Trump is a serial liar. He lies to his family, he lies to the people, he lies to the courts, he lies non-stop. He would have lied if Biden performed outstandingly in the debate. He would have lied if Biden put in a middling performance. And, he lied when Biden performed badly. Are we supposed to be clutching our pearls in shock that Trump lied?
So, we can't judge Biden's terrible performance by the 'other guy'. We need to judge whether Biden could win in November. And if you had of watched all 90 minutes, like I did, there was zero confidence that he could. The GOP campaign would have portrayed Biden's lost moments a million times, over and over and over again. And they'd be stupid not to. And yes, Trump lied in the debate. Let's try and turn the broken bus around on the seemingly new information that a serial liar lied on stage.
The proof of this was the instant jump in the polls once Harris became the candidate and the growing support since. Is the argument that all these covert GOP critics suddenly turned Dems? Or, perhaps, changing to Haris was the sensible thing to do, and perhaps, just might keep the orange turd out of the white house.
They all on truth. And by truth i mean not the truth, i mean the a-social network truth.
They're here, you can find them if you look in the right places - however, most fediverse admins are technically apt and left leaning so Trump bullshit often gets folks banned and, when it doesn't, they usually get a very negative response.
There probably are some right-wing instances, but I'm guessing they all got defederated for... reasons...
Conservatives already have their own platforms e.g. truth social, twitter, 4chan, others
The very format of Lemmy is more egalitarian. For example, it gives an enormous amount of power to individual users to filter out unwanted content, and decentralizes content moderation over a variety of instances. This doesn't appeal to some right-wing ideologues who seem to value more hierarchical, centralized systems. Basically, Lemmy is more democratic (or has the potential to be more democratic) than other platforms.
Lemmy in general is developed and maintained by Communists, for starters. FOSS in general, especially FOSS social media, is a Leftist answer to already existing Capitalist Social Media.
There are right-wing instances like Exploding Heads, which is a Nazi instance, but they are defederated from every major instance.
There are/were some users and communities... a couple of Lemmy examples I remember...
Wolfballs was a conservative troll Lemmy server that was quickly defederated by major servers for their antics. They shut they server down after some years, way before Lemmy got to the size it is now.
Old_Geezer (@marathon@lemmy.ca) was a prolific poster and was a long time Lemmy member on Lemmy.ca, had some decent takes, but modded a geopolitics community where daily he posted the right-wing version of Russian propaganda, banning anyone that posted stuff there that went against that narrative. About 3 months ago, he was getting tired of the community pushback, eventually got banned by admins for his moderating behaviour.
!conservative@lemm.ee is an example of an active conservative community on Lemmy. You can see there is one regular poster and nearly all the posts are net downvoted. I request people don't go there just for the purpose of picking a fight.
Most community mods and site admins don't proactively remove conservative opinions as long as they aren't personal attacks or trolling, and that they're not being xenophobic in a community that's meant to have safe discussion for a group (e.g. anti-trans rhetoric in a trans-oriented community). However conservative opinions do get downvoted heavily by users, occasionally getting reported which sometimes leads to comment removals and bans. So it can be tiring to keep participating in a generally left-leaning network that rejects or is hostile to them.
In addition to the other points made, not nearly as many people use Lemmy so it’s not as much of a target for bots.
The alt-right/Trump content on sites like Reddit and Twitter is amplified out of proportion by bots.
There is a whole separate lemmyverse full of conservatives and pedophilia. They are defederated from every sane instance.