It's because political discussion (and in general most commentary) on Reddit / Meta / Xitter has become overtly censored, and there's a real concern that it's tracked - a bad thing in an authoritarian regime barreling towards facism. Those who wish to have real political discourse having been moving away, and lemmy is receiving a lot of that traffic.
As an example, referring to a list of CEO's on Reddit as "Luigi's List" will get you a ban warning for inciting violence.
This increase in sensitivity to the potential implications of real political speech, coupled with increasingly stringent rules on the parts of the mods and accelerated by the auto-mod bots and AI chat bots, has led to a very restrictive discussion environment on the big social media networks. Even Bluesky, which is left-leaning and possesses the architecture for multiple servers to avoid centralization, is following this pattern.
Lemmy / Mastodon are attractive because they're not as restrictive, when you're posting you're interacting with real people, and because the mods and admins are humans dealing with a manageable population. And if someone censors you on the server you're on, you just move to another. More and more folks are realizing this as the enshitification of the big 3 continues.
Fear not, the memes will live on, but I think that in a very real way, Lemmy's (and the Fediverse's) time is upon us, and this is the result. People are using it for real shit because the real shit is upon us, and we need a place where we can freely discuss how to get clear of the incoming shitstorm.
Read up on the Cronkite Era and the Fairness Doctrine.
Companies could only own one TV/radio [AM and FM] station in each town, plus you had a couple of newspapers in even small places. When Reagan came in he started the trend to 'deregulate' the media.
Along with his many other great accomplishments, he created homelessness in America.
Before he became California Governor, the state had a great mental health system. Plenty of beds for those who were unable to self care. Ronnie cut those beds and suddenly there were undomiciled folks wandering the streets. That meant the cops and prisons had to get more money to deal with the problem.
It worked so well that as soon as he was President he did it again.
Posting a kill list seems pretty questionable to me. I get how there can be some dark humor in that but I can totally see how that's calling for violence.
The issue is the rich are committing organized violence against all of us every day, but just theorizing on how we can organize and retaliate is a crime.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives, and the rich understand that too.