No Stupid Questions

I'm sure this will come if the wrong way but if you're genuinely concerned about discovering diversity of thought, you're going to have to tell us what your positions are for example.

I'm all for finding diversity, but so often what people who post these are looking for is an echo chamber. Like if you're really wanting to be challenged, and you're a conservative, go to https://socialistworker.org/ and read up.

But if what you're concerned about is the nerds in Lemmy seem to be left leaning, that's just the nature of smart creative people. We value skills and creativity over hierarchy and structure.

If you're after moderate right flavored discussion I sympathize but you'll have trouble finding it as the broader right has been consumed by alt right and far right. If your point is that those viewpoints specifically are missing from Lemmy then I'd say it's a good riddance. I just wish Lemmy was as hard on some immature leftie takes.

I’ve skimmed some of your comments, and honestly it looks like you’re already getting a diverse experience considering your political and ideological way of thinking. That’s not a condemnation, but a quick observation.

Lemmy is already diverse, you just gotta find the right instance, or multiple instances! The whole point of joining your platform to the federation is for visibility and control

Yeah it's hard to say. Fark? HackerNews? Bluesky? Tildes? You'll just have to try a bunch and see what catches on with you. You're welcome to try Lemmy again anytime, so who's to stop you from a break from it?

I've been saying for a year, Lemmy and the Fediverse is specifically designed to be like a series of echochambers, since the community, the moderation and local userbase are designed all around that. Ultimately, you have the freedom to choose who and what to allow and block yourself.

Personally I think you are subjecting yourself to grief by interacting with hexbear and lemmygrad but I'm not here to scold or police what you choose to do.

I think one major difference that can make your experience negative is that posts on Reddit can't show below zero, and people here use the downvote button more often because they have strong feelings on a topic. In my experience on controversial topics you would have various threads where both sides of an argument receive downvotes which is a sign there are diverse perspectives. You just have to live with and not be bothered by a negative score, it means nothing. Some examples:

• Israel vs. Palestine narratives (Lemmy overall leans a little more toward Palestine but I've seen either get downvoted depending on community over the months)
• pro-Biden vs anti-Biden (this is a very controversial one and sure some of it is anti-American propaganda and "both sides are the same"-type of sealioning, still both perspectives get downvoted).
• Ukraine (this one is easy, you're either on a community under .ml moderation or not, which determines the overall narrative)

This is all to say that the best way to get 'diverse' opinions on Lemmy is to hop around various communities, brace yourself for downvotes and just try to be genuine about it. For non-controversial content we all gotta do our part, speaking of which I haven't posted much OC lately so I'll get onto that soon in a couple days.

There's some irony to how good thread this turned out to be

Lemmy is a federation of servers. "Lemmy" is not one political group with one viewpoint. If you're looking for different viewpoints, try different groups, or different servers.

In another comment you said this about the comments you read:

they're made in bad faith

I don't think this is true. I think that what you think is "bad faith" is actually "people who disagree with me". So far, most users of Lemmy appear to trend politically left by American standards, but that's only because American standards are so absurdly skewed to the right that it appears to stand out. By American standards, "truth" is left-wing.

Ask yourself what you're actually looking for.

Tildes might work for you. Politics is a banned subject, but you'll get polite discourse on most subjects.

I found it stifling, personally. But if you like overly verbose, overly polite discussions where all opinions are respected as long as it's long winded and politely communicated, well, that's your place.

I don't think there is one, unfortunately. I agree that lack of ideological diversity is a problem with the Fediverse in general, but it's a problem that likely won't go away unless the Fediverse becomes mainstream.

Honestly? It's tricky to find communities that give you a spread.

I can recommend picking an instance that has a secondary alignment with you (for example, country/state), as they'll tend to pick up posts in All that may be of interest other than politics.

(Though tbf, our instance still leans left on whole. Just not so crazily)

How the actual fuck is the answer Reddit?

While I see a lot of posts that would have this problem, at least the discussion are a bit more balanced compared to when the same stuff would happen on Reddit. So for example fuck cars is about the same in terms of posts, but here I tend to see a bit more back and forth and a balanced perspective on how the comments are up voted. On Reddit, any comment vaguely questioning the circle jerk will be down voted into oblivion and receive nothing but angry replies.

The amount of apolitical posts is a bit disappointing though.

I'm not sure whether there can be an ideologically neutral social media platform at all. I think there will always be a significant proportion of users who are not interested in discussion, arguments and open minded exchange, but rather in seeing their world view confirmed by others or simply being part of a perceived in-group.

What's more, the sheer mass of content makes an attention economy necessary so that one can deal with this flood of information. In my opinion, the content that is easy to consume will always prevail over content that looks at a topic in all its complexity (hardly anyone is willing/has the time to read up on it). So it's often not about who has the better arguments or actually knows something about a topic, but about who sells their posts better. In this sense, it seems to me that social media in general is not really social, but to a large extent a competition for attention.

I am not aware of any platform that could solve these problems. In my opinion, this is not really the aim, as pretty much all platforms are not really about objective information, but rather about passing the time and entertainment. Of course, that doesn't mean that you can't find good discussions and serious information. But I think that this kind of content will never be the main focus of any social media plattform. The fediverse approach seems like a good try to me tho, because there can be "special interest instances" that can make their own rules to focus on whatever they are about.

Kbin interacts with Lemmy and seems to me to contain reasonable people willing to have respectful discussions

What have you tried? There are communities of all types on here. If you say something, there are definitely people who will agree and others who will disagree. Most will express it quite badly and few will give a thoughtful response. Reddit, I find, was much worse at nuance.

/r/askmen for example was open to anybody asking questions while /r/askwomen was heavily heavily moderated and didn't allow diverging views. /r/science turned into a place for science memes. /r/politics was just a battleground for left and right wingers calling each other names, and places about men's health were consistently attacked by other subs. Reddit seemed like twitter's second coming - with communities.