Hi new user here. I’ve been checking out Lemmy but the amount of bias is ruining it for me. For example the front page right now has 7 out of 20 submissions that contain the word Trump in a negative context. I don’t care about Trump but when the front page is all political posts attacking Trump I have to wonder about the health of the site.
In the most simple sense, could Republican submissions survive on Lemmy politics community ignoring the voting behavior or would the site and moderators itself actively suppress it to “keep the peace”? I think this gets to the heart of the question and again, this isn’t political to me, it’s purely mechanical. I think that if a social media site has a community called “politics” that is solely made up of stories promoting one party while shitting on the other then the entire site is inherently flawed. It isn’t being genuine in what it offers and is incapable of providing it.
It’s like if you had a community named “cars” but you’re only allowed to talk positively about certain manufacturers. Imagine most people either like Ford or Chevy but on the “cars” community it “just so happens” that everyone there likes Ford.
You can post about Chevy but you have to be careful about how reliable the information is. You have an article that says Chevy’s new SUV produces 500 horsepower? Well, that source isn’t reliable. In fact this Ford biased source did a study showing it only produces 400 horsepower. You think that isn’t a reliable source? This Ford biased bias checker agrees that your Chevy source is biased but our Ford source is not biased. No, we can’t just give people information and let them decide for themselves. That’s dangerous. We can only give them our rock solid Ford sources in order to protect humanity.
Did you comment that you sometimes prefer Chevy for certain things? Well, in this Ford biased community that’s not going to go over well. Now you have 1000 downvotes and 100 comments calling you an idiot. Try to defend your opinions? Too bad, you can only respond every 15 minutes. You have too many downvotes. Well, look at that, the dumb Chevy poster realized he is a moron and had nothing to say in response. Clearly the Ford posters were right again. After all, just look at all those downvotes and comments and the Chevy poster didn’t even reply.
So what do you end up with?
You get a “cars” community, a “ford” community, and a “chevy” community but you’re not allowed to talk about Chevy in cars. You can only organically talk about Chevy in the Chevy community. That is until the site administrators start getting involved and deciding that really it isn’t safe for humanity to let Chevy people talk about Chevy in the Chevy community. They’ve been posting unreliable sources in there, using bad language towards Ford posters, and so on. It’s a dangerous hate community so we’re going to shut it down. You can talk about Chevy in the cars community if you want.
Then you get biased Ford stories under the “cars” community showing up on the front page. Anyone who prefers Chevy will never have their submissions seen because it is relegated to a smaller community that algorithmically won’t show up. If it somehow does get big and popular enough the admins step in and boot it or artificially step on promoting it.
Again, I don’t care about politics and you can substitute Biden for Trump and make comparisons to other social media sites. I’m simply asking if Lemmy is offering anything different with regards to this situation.
Can someone explain how it is different from the Reddit moderator and suppression rules? So far Lemmy is producing the same biased garbage I see on Reddit so I’d like to know if this is a function of Lemmy itself like it is on Reddit or if it’s just echos of Reddit that could one day go away. Is Lemmy something new or is it just for people who loved NuReddit but are mad about the API changes?
Server owners and admins, and communities creators and mods can set the tone of the communities they manage, of course.
If you think a car community is too ford-leaning you can look for or create another one, if it’s the whole instance then subscribe to another instance cars community (I’m subscribed to the same communities from several instances, I guess it has to be pretty common), or even make an account in that other instance just in case the Chevy folk start hanging out with nazis, as they always end up doing, and the rest defederate from them.
Edit: oh! And you can block all the posts with a specific site as a source, so you can take away everything from fordnews.com and not see it anymore
I should point out (even though I converted to a Ford guy) that it was Henry Ford who was awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest civilian honor bestowed by the Third Reich. He was a rabid anti-Semite.
On that note, everyone who, as a result of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, is dumping their Teslas for Volkswagen EVs is supporting a company started by the Third Reich that used Nazi concentration camp slave labor.
Lemmy isn’t a platform at all. It’s a piece of forum software.
The platforms are the individual instances - lemmy.world or lemmy.ml or lemm.ee or whatever. There’s well over 1,000 of them total. And they range all the way from extreme left to extreme right, and from rigidly constrained to entirely open.
And since it is the case that there are well over 1,000 instances, each of them privately owned and managed by whatever standards the owners prefer, there is no mechanism by which any particular bias can be maintained at anything above the instance level. That necessarily means that any lemmy-wide bias you might see can only be organic.
You might honestly think about that, and what it says about the ideology you’re trying to pretend you’re not defending.
Nah. It says a lot about the largely tech-aware user base, virtually all of which votes in a single direction.
I always wonder about these ‘omg bashing on trump’ questions. It’s because he’s a highly confrontational jerk who makes a living from being controversial. To extend your analogy, yeah, if Chevy uh, was constantly insulting 60% of the country while ripping people off and tried to overthrow the government, people would probably be complaining about them in the same way.
Well…Chevrolet does use patriotic imagery to sell (excluding their full-size vans and the Malibu) crappy cars, thus ripping people off. Their parent company, General Motors
CorporationCompany also did a sleight-of-hand trick that took all kinds of money from the American taxpayer we’ll never see again. So that’s a large contribution to our eventual default on the national debt, which will lead to an eventual overthrow of the government.
It feels like you’re fishing for a “go fuck yourself, and your poorly disguised concern trolling” comment. Congrats, you’ve caught one.
Borderline comment. I’ll leave it here, but tone it down please.
You will never be able to stop people having biases, I think we have learned that thus far. It is really hard to prevent no matter where you go. What Lemmy allows the individual to do is remove those constantly negative hate groups from being visible for them. Lemmy gives us options, you can block users, communities, and instances. Well that’s great and all, but maybe you still want to see political content, just not negative stuff constantly.
Part of being federated is that we can have multiple politics communities of the same name on many different instances. If you have a power mod suppressing one community, you can go to another or create your own under your rules that you see fit. Some moderators and user dynamics do a really good job at removing biases as best they can for the sake of good journalism.
It is no easy feat to accomplish that, but Lemmy (and the fediverse in general) makes it possible to accomplish. You can’t say that for many other social networks.
That’s right. I’m not sure if anyone federates with them, but Gab runs Mastodon, which has some ActivityPub compatibility with Kbin on toots / microblogging.
And how is that any different from Reddit? If you waltzed into r/politics, you would have basically the same thing you just described.
OP, if you legitimately cared about getting a balanced view, then get a RSS reader and read news from either Associated Press and Reuters, or read news from outlets like Fox and CNBC. You can also just look for a right-leaning Fediverse instance because I can guarantee you that you can find one.
It’s a cross-section of not of society but of the popular Lemmy instances’ respective user bases. You could argue all day about merits of right-wing philosophies and policies and you’d still be heckled into oblivion for this reason.
I’ll second what others have said: if you get heckled into oblivion by people who refuse to listen, go join or create another Lemmy instance and find some who will.
Welcome to the Fediverse!
