Ask Lemmy

What kind of bias?

The overwhelming majority of time I see those requests, it's right wingers being offended by basic respect of human beings that they deem to be inferior and want to freely discriminate against.

I tried free speech absolutism in the past and it always ends up with incredibly toxic communities. Moderation is good.

In 10 years even on Reddit, I never had any encounters with mods or admins. I've never been able to find the tyrannical mods that everyone whines about.

Hey, I know your username! Familiar from the reports I'm getting 😁

On a more serious note - there's no such thing as unbiased. I'd like to believe I run my instance in a fair way, but I can't guarantee you'd like my definition of fair.

Make your own instance. There'll still be bias but at least it'll be your own.

A question like this I would've expected in !casualconversation@lemmy.world

That depends on personal experience. Often we don't think of something as biased until we find the bias. Some people might mention a bias they see that others don't, and others vice versa. And bias is a spectrum. And sometimes the people have a bias but not the management, and vice versa. And even then, a place could be biased but tolerant or intolerant but unbiased.

If I had to choose, in my experience, Mastodon has been cozy. If only it had more people. Maybe that's why it's comfy.

Your own instance

In general, I think that most instances give an up-front impression of how the instance admin wants to run things based on their rules.

You can see a lemmy instance's rules in the right-hand sidebar of the main page.

You can see a kbin instance's rules at /terms; for kbin.social, this would be:

https://kbin.social/terms

I'm pretty happy with sh.itjust.works.

Why is this downvoted so much? It seems like a legit question, and there are good answers.

Clearly some instances have tons of bias, so asking for the opposite should be possible.

All instances have an agenda. Some of them align closer to your ideals so they feel less notorious, but would be obvious for someone of opposing ideology.

At feddit.uk we have a pro-tea bias (!tea@feddit.uk) and a definite inclination towards talking about the weather.

I was pretty happy with lemmy.world, only jumped ship there because they take forever to update the instance. Mander is good for what you describe but very limited in scope, which happens to suit me since I am well aligned with the scope.

I personally like dbzer0. Anarchist instance owned by a former moderator of the piracy subreddit. (Obviously if you are right leaning politically you won't be welcome, but that goes for basically the entirety of lemmy)

D&D?

kbin.social is pretty neutral, in my experience. There's communities here for both the left and the right. There's naturally going to be some clash in the comments from time to time, but it goes both ways fairly equally, from what I've seen.

That said, regardless of what instance you go with, your experience is going to be dictated largely by what communities you end up subscribing to.

Especially in social issues and politics there is no unbiased. In science you can often (not always) rely on evidence, which gets a lot of its own bias (yes, scientific papers have biases) removed by being peer reviewed and supported by many other scientists (hoping to cancel out the internal biases). Though in social issues and politics its very different. Sure, there are scientific papers here too, but they cannot give definite answers on what to do about it. You get a bunch of facts without definitiv reason (like the number of births in a country with only hints on what might (!) influence this number) and politics is often about how things should be, according to people. Very different people eith many different opinions on how things should be.

Probably you could look through the sidebars of many instancesn searching for one, that fits your own view of what is "unbiased". Though not clearly stating what that means socially and politicly can make this difficult.