Fedi attracts anarchists, socialists, and communists because the administrative style is one of community responsibility, personal safety, and a more active system where you get out what you put in. Fedi mods are often pretty responsive and most of them are chill knowledgable people with leftist tendencies, so like attracts like. But in order to feel comfortable in a fedi space you have to research your server, communicate regularly with local users, stay on top of blocks, and get to know the meta a bit.

Liberals like mainstream services like reddit/instagram/etc because they incentivise turning your brain off. After signing up, the system is designed to feed you content and only show you concerning ideas if they’re trying to bait you into ‘engagement’ as a kind of free advertising.

Fedi conflict is more similar to real life conflict where you see a lot of the same people all the time and sometimes have to figure out how to solve problems together. This is why things like mutual aid are common on mastodon. This is also why I think lemmy could have only been created by communists. You have to be commited to the slog for the good of your community.

Conservatives and fash, conversely, try to create social networks where no trust is involved. They make crypto-based apps, chan sites, and fedi forks where anonymity trumps all else, communication is only entertainment, and blocking is an annoyance because they would rather troll than feel the slightest bit of rejection.

I don’t see being radical - thinking differently, behaving differently - as a bad thing per se. We don’t all want to plant bombs at the last night of the proms (sorry, Billy), or even hate people who don’t think/behave the way we do.

Hmmm, I think that in the fediverse (as almost in any other place) radicals are a thing, but bc the community is in a smaller scale they make much more noise. And bc how the fediverse works they will be always able to create their own instance or whatever. It’s noot cool, but you can’t censor only “bad things”. Just make respect a rule for every interaction and all should be good.

Sure, as a radical, you can thrive in the fediverse, but what’s the alternative really? Censorship, catering to advertisers, closed systems… it’s your choice.

To be honest, I find alternative media platforms a little disappointing. Like it feels as if a platform doesn’t have a progressive code of conduct then it just becomes a hub for far-right politics, conspiracy theorists, and then some linux users who are like “it’s not just for neonazis! I’m here too!” when the majority of the content is the other things.

This isn’t necessarily a criticism of federated services, I mean Lemmy doesn’t have that specific issue and I haven’t used mastodon that much but as far as I’m aware it doesn’t really have this problem either, so maybe there’s something specifically about federation or the communities behind federated software that creates specific outcomes?

In general, I just wish the left would adopt more of these platform, it seems like most leftists have become very comfortable on mainstream platforms because most of our social views are in line with the tech companies behind these platforms (which isn’t a bad thing of course), and we don’t really have the influence/organization to threaten them where we disagree.

Also what’s meant by echo chamber? I don’t really like the term that much because it’s often pretty vague and reduces human experiences to just their interaction on a specific platform. For instance, a place that’s only for socialists isn’t necessarily an echo chamber. For one, there’s a lot of internal variety there and also when you live in a world that’s predominately capitalist you’re inevitably going to be exposed to and have to interact with capitalism supports and capitalist ideas.

The fediverse isn’t really a special entity in this regard. By it’s very nature, the Internet itself can be used to build & operate silos of just about any sort, and people have been dreaming up ways to do so for quite some time.

Most of the fediverse platforms have ways of dealing with radicals, or dangerous people, misinformation spreaders, white supremacists, what have you, which are pretty effective, especially if administrators and moderators do their thing in bulk. There’s obviously some challenges where people put up their platform, allow everyone and their dog to use it, and then abandon managing it, leaving it to rot in the hands of spammers, criminals and low lifes.

On the whole, though, I don’t think “the fediverse” is necessarily making for a safe space for such nonsense - those types gets blocked, filtered, shunned, isolated, etc, just as moderation intended. If they’re criminal, they can be reported to their respective network, web and DNS service providers just like any other entity online.

Anything that isn’t moderated can be and “is”. Its not our responsibility to make sure people aren’t breaking the law. Hopefully that won’t happen on Lemmy but at some point it probably will. Its a double edged sword. Lemmy is meant to be used for good but will inevitably be used for “evil”. There’s not much we can do to stop it

Sadly I kinda aggree. Many people don’t like censorship, but many don’t really care , they just got banned somewhere else and they move to a Free platform- and here they’ll be much more % of all ‘normal’ users, meaning for us who don’t share their often ‘extremist views’ it won’t be so nice content on Lemmy and they’ll abandon it sooner and even more % of all users will be ‘them’.

That’s the problem with freedom. But it’s the wrong thing to restrict freedom for everyone in order to accommodate for such people. In a democracy you also put up with right, extreme and or stupid people. and for a good reason. I believe the correct way to handle this is to moderate, write good tools to assist with moderation, block them / don’t federate with these instances. But it’s probably alarming that alternative platforms could be associated with those people.

It’s rando,m. It’s what the internet was in the late 90’s.

Yes but it is because here is a safe space where you can share your ideas no matter what they are

I quite hope not. Although I lean left and socio-liberal I come to social platforms such as Lemmy to take a break from the usual politics.

yes, “free/libre” software usually attracts nazis, especially gpl licenses. that’s why lemmy should start using an ethical open source license and get serious about getting rid of right-wingers