Why I Haven't Seen Any Trump Supporters In Fediverse (Lemmy and Mastodon)?
as a person that came from the 3rd world country and new in fediverse environment, i genuinely would like to know about this.
edit: thanks for the replies! sorry, i literally don't know the reason since i'm not a western lol. twitter/x is too biased especially when musk openly supports trump so i came here and seeing fediverse is mostly are harris or biden (when he's still up for the candidate) supporters. don't know about reddit tho, i only use reddit as a forum for linux and programming stuff.
I think a lot of the people on Lemmy came from Reddit when the whole API thing happened. It was pretty much a boycott. I assume most of the people who cared enough about that to leave were mostly left-leaning.
Reddit chased away the Trump supporters before the API thing happened. When it did, some people like me who are classic-liberals and libertarians also came over. After all, Lemmy is an inherently libertarian platform even when its users aren't. When I express a political opinion objectionable to leftists, I get several times more down-votes than up-votes but I do get up-votes.
This is an interesting perception, because if you mean American libertarianism then this doesn't really make sense. Lemmy's creators are communist and intended it to be anti-corporate. It is designed in a decentralized manner specifically to avoid situations where companies can own and profit from it.
The kinds of platforms I would see as being libertarian (in the American sense) are the diaspora of privately owned social media companies.
If it's libertarian it's libertarian socialist. There's no property or capital on here, posts get boosted by collective voting, not based off your following or account. There's not even an idea of karma, your account means basically nothing here. A capitalist libertarian social media would be something like nostr or what bluesky is claiming it'll eventually do where you completely own your account and your following and you can use that social capital as you wish.
I think this is an example of where the left-right axis isn't the most adequate way of viewing things. The Fediverse in general is anti-authoritarian. You can be all the way from a far-left anarchist to a far-right anarcho-capitalist and still be anti-authoritarian, just like both tankies and nazis are authoritarian.
As a libertarian liberal, what communities would you recommend? I'm sad there's not a more active free speech community on this platform. The reddit one is such a gross conservative circle jerk rn.
You either refuse to acknowledge all the terrible things he's done, or you approve of the things he's done.
People who refuse to acknowledge, are going to look at all the "fake news" on this site about His Oranginess, and quickly decide that it's nothing but propaganda and go somewhere "more reliable".
Those who agree, stick around a little longer. They will argue and defend the horrible things, because they think there are more like them that will come out and back them up as a fellow defender of racismmisogynyhomophobia "Good old family values". But they will be downvoted to oblivion and have trouble finding a friendly voice. Eventually, they too will go where they can have a more comfortable discussion with people who are as terrible as they are.
And ironically enough, if you went to Truth Social, and asked why there weren't more Biden/Harris supporters there, they'd give you the exact same answer in reverse.
We had an opportunity years ago to fix this problem. Long before Trump ever showed up on the scenes as a political individual. We needed in schools to be teaching how to pick out real news from fake news. How to pick out fact from propaganda. Hell out to read a newspaper properly.
How to logically pick a part in argument. We chose not to. We as a society, decided not to put our money towards that. Now people read a headline, and based purely on the headline, make a statement such as “throw the guy in jail for the rest of his life for that one “.
I sat on a jury trial. It was a murder trial, if you went purely by what was in the local newspaper, you would’ve seriously questioned why the guy didn’t just take a plea deal. If you sat in that courtroom day after day, listening to it you’d realize this is a lot tougher than what you realize. we had a hard time figuring out if the guy was even in town at the time of the murder.
But for those that weren’t involved in the trial, they’re convinced the guy belonged in jail for the rest of his life. Because people didn’t sit down and really read the newspaper and ask important questions. Because we don’t hold our journalists to a higher standard and force them to give all the information And tell both sides of the story.
I have no idea how you solve the problem anymore. Because at this point, even if you tell the complete truth about any given politician, no one‘s going to believe what they’re reading anymore because there’s another so-called journalist out there saying the exact opposite and people say well I don’t know what to believe then. And can’t figure out how to critically think about this and ask questions.
Here in Lemmy we are guilty of the same sort of thing, same as over at truth social same as over at Twitter same as over Facebook.
As a society, I’m sorry for the language here, we are well and truly fucked.
I truly don’t know what the answer is.
Also sidenote 10 bucks says somebody comes back with a stupid comment of well since you don’t know what the answer is obviously you’re just saying that we shouldn’t do anything and just give up.
If you've never watched the movie 12 Angry Men, do yourself a favor and watch it. You are going to love it and it has everything to do with your comment.
Neglecting public education is really going to keep biting us in the ass.
Something like half of US adults can't read at a sixth grade level.
If we took some of the idiotic venture capitalist "it's cat gifs on the block chain" nonsense and put it into education and infrastructure, we'd be so much better off.
I don't really know how to get from here to there, either. Give me magic powers to Thanos snap away some people, maybe?
I have no idea how you solve the problem anymore. Because at this point, even if you tell the complete truth about any given politician, no one‘s going to believe what they’re reading anymore because there’s another so-called journalist out there saying the exact opposite and people say well I don’t know what to believe then. And can’t figure out how to critically think about this and ask questions.
We needed in schools to be teaching how to pick out real news from fake news.
Obviously there are issues with education in this country but it's always an easy scapegoat for these kinds of issues. Plenty of states have skills like this in their common core, I would venture to say you're incorrect on that point.
Reddit's early days were also far more left leaning then they eventually became.
When you have a small niche of nerds who enjoy discussing topics and ideas, then far right wing points will get downvoted to hell because they are, quite frankly, dumb, divorced from logic and the real world, and don't stand up to actual critical scrutiny.
Reddit got more right leaning as it grew and expanded into the general population and more dummies started upvoting dumb posts, then got more right leaning when right wing political orgs took notice and started trying to influence it, and now seems even more right leaning because they've changed their algorithms to prioritize controversial comments and posts that get people angry because it boosts engagement.
While very true, dont discount apathy and lurking. I may have made 15-20 comments on reddit for tge 10+ yrs I was on the platform.
There were so many ppl 1. That typically someone else would respond. Two reddit descended into ppl who just want to argue semantics.
Here without the karma farming people have more genuine responses
Over on mastodon on the other hand... I get the feeling people brought some of the negative aspects of twitter over there. Still overwhelmingly positive but I tend to get more info on lemmy now than mastodon
Imo
I don't think there's any less karma farming on here. People still look at their up and downvotes, and I don't think there was a legitimate industry for selling high karma accounts on Reddit. Not one that would make a difference at scale anyways.
The problem with Mastodon and Twitter is structural, it's based around following people, not topics. It is inherently problematic because a) personalities and status get elevated over the logic of the argument, b) following people instead of topics inherently feeds people's egos in a problematic way, and c) a given person can use their followers problematically (brigading, etc). On Reddit / Lemmy by following decentralized topics it eliminates or reduces most of these effects, though the mods controlling each subreddit can exercise some of the same influence.
Yeah. It's the advantage but also disadvantage of the Fediverse. If you're on the wrong instance you won't even notice that certain ideologies are right out blocked by the instance owner. This can go into all political directions. You wouldn't even notice this happening unless you do research on which instances are blocked by yours.
Personally I'm cool with that. I don't think daily exposure to actual fascists is good for one's head. And I wouldn't mind .ml getting the axe too (though I'm not gonna be the one pestering my instance admin about that) because Tankies are equally as draining.
That's the thing. On one hand I like not being bombarded by the shit opinions but on the other I like being informed at what the talking points are (to a degree) because I find that keeps me sharp against the opposition. When I read or hear about conservative viewpoints, I only think about how obtuse the logic is so it's not something I worry at all about affecting my mindspace so this might not be a solution to everyone.
I'm still torn on the topic since it's nice to not give a platform to obviously shit ideals since that's how the misinformation spreads but I still wonder if there's an even better protocol out there we haven't been able to even comprehend yet.
It's insane. I left reddit because I thought it was an over-moderated echo chamber with too much corporate influence.
Lemmy is somehow an even worse echo chamber and it didn't need corporate influence to see it happen.
There are plenty of Trump supporters here. Every comment from someone who implies one shouldn't vote for Harris because of the Israel-Gaza war is likely someone trying to suppress Democrat turnout. Single issue voting is the only way the GOP ever win.
You: “Hitler can’t take back office, but we do need to continue the concentration camps. People who don’t want concentration camps are directly supporting Hitler.”
My brother in christ you cannot compromise on fucking genocide. Liberals like you are so fucking scared of the orange man that you are willing to let hundreds of thousands die without even asking for better.
If all you're voting on is how they respond to Gaza, Harris isn't great but Trump is exponentially worse. He's openly said that Israel should continue what they're doing.
In fact, in every metric of comparison Trump is exponentially worse. It's not that we're scared of Trump, it's that he is so much worse in every regard.
You're willing to let millions die for how many more generations in Gaza with Hamas in charge, and tens of millions if Iran shoots its shot at Israel? Grow up.
They're here, anything pro trump is often downvoted, and most things heavily critical of the Dems are also often downvoted.
For better or worse, there's not a lot of right wing stuff that makes it into the positive on votes.
If you sort new, you'll see it pop up from time to time.
It's hard to tell sometimes, but it certainly feels like some political regimes are trying out dropping propaganda here or there into the conversation. I'm sure most of it is from genuine users, but there are some comments that just look like they're here to stir up dissent.
You occasionally run into some disagreeable but unobjectionable "traditional" conservative opinions, usually around economics and the governments role in it, but trump shit isn't that. We can be friends if you think a market solution is viable or better than an entitlement program. We can't be friends if you think a significant portion of your fellow citizens are vermin or that we should just let terrible problems continue or get worse.
The window has just shifted so far that literal objective depictions of reality are described as "left".
It would be nice to have some opposition, though. Even if most "conservative" media right now is little more than xenophobia, or cult worship, there do exist sound arguments against the typical internet-left positions. I don't have a solid enough read on what comes through New in the fediverse to say whether any of that is being submitted and just downvoted off everyone's feeds, or if all that's being submitted is the average conservative media junk.
Still, political spaces without opposition/diversity invariably degenerate into purity contests, and circle jerking.
I like it this way. It's not an "echo chamber" because we do have some interesting liberal vs leftist discussions. I think I've already heard quite enough conservative nonsense though; they aren't entitled to my consideration forever.
They absolutely exist. But in general, I think most people here are informed and choose a wide variety of information to consume. That is exactly the opposite of most Trump supporters.
My honest interpretation is that there are actually very few right wing propagandists masquerading as lefties, but they are very effective at bringing hapless idiot lefties to their narrative.
Careful with that troll word, there are mods that will ban you for saying it. They tell you to report trolls to them, so I did (a very obvious troll) and I got banned. Pretty neat you can't appeal, and you can't find out which mod did it either.
What are you taking about? Lemmy.world loves to ban those pointing out genocide supporters. Cause totally every one who wishes Israel to stop the genocide is a dirty republican. At least that's how the mods treat them
There are a couple masquerading as Green Party supporters, and you do see blatently pro-Trump posters occasionally, but most of them are lurkers who, if they comment, hide behind criticizing Democrats rather than voicing pro-Trump sentiments.
Look for the people who were smashing Biden for the debate behavior while ignoring Trump's Alzheimer's symptoms. The people being nitpicking Harris or Walz, while being silent about the Couch-Fucker and Orange Stalin. Those are the pro-Trump lurkers. There aren't many, though, because they don't thrive outside of an echo chamber.
Lemmy's an echo chamber as well, but you'll find plenty of people who criticize both parties, and while a lot of people like Kamala, very few claim she's perfect, or worship her. And there's plenty of legitimate criticism of the Democratic party, and strong sentiment about a need for change in US politics. This is the sort of discussion and debate which would not be sanctioned in most conservative forums, and could easily get you banned. So I think it's fair to say Lemmy is far less echo-y than most.
I think that your metrics for picking covert Trumpers based upon that appaling debate is incorrect and simplistic. I watched every second of that shit show and believed that we were doomed for another 4 years of the orange turd.
Trump lied during the debate. Some estimates were that he lied upwards of 250 times in his 45 minutes at the mic. Those numbers seems off, but who knows? I don't know the true figure, but it was insane. However, it is also not the fucking point. Trump is a serial liar. He lies to his family, he lies to the people, he lies to the courts, he lies non-stop. He would have lied if Biden performed outstandingly in the debate. He would have lied if Biden put in a middling performance. And, he lied when Biden performed badly. Are we supposed to be clutching our pearls in shock that Trump lied?
So, we can't judge Biden's terrible performance by the 'other guy'. We need to judge whether Biden could win in November. And if you had of watched all 90 minutes, like I did, there was zero confidence that he could. The GOP campaign would have portrayed Biden's lost moments a million times, over and over and over again. And they'd be stupid not to. And yes, Trump lied in the debate. Let's try and turn the broken bus around on the seemingly new information that a serial liar lied on stage.
The proof of this was the instant jump in the polls once Harris became the candidate and the growing support since. Is the argument that all these covert GOP critics suddenly turned Dems? Or, perhaps, changing to Haris was the sensible thing to do, and perhaps, just might keep the orange turd out of the white house.
I think that your metrics for picking covert Trumpers based upon that appaling debate is incorrect and simplistic.
Well, yeah, it's simplistic. I'm generalizing.
I watched every second of that shit show and believed that we were doomed for another 4 years of the orange turd.
I agree. Biden had a bad night (and, it appears in retrospect, had been declining for a while). Trump has been a deranged narcissistic sociopath since day 1; Biden was held to a higher standard than Trump. Biden performs poorly, and the heart sunk out of the Democratic faithful. Trump performs poorly, and that's just par for the course, because all Trumpers care about is hurting liberals.
However, I admit I don't know what you're arguing; I think we agree on most of this. The Harris bump was because (as I said) it gave liberals hope that they could win. The bump came from undecideds who suddenly saw an energized, engaged, and competent viable candidate as an option; or people who before saw only two decrepit old white men (The Patriarchy) feebly flailing for control, and suddenly one of the candidates was strong, under 60, female, and a minority!
We're answering OP's question why there aren't more Trumpers on Lemmy. There are; they're just hidden, and how they respond to the debate outs them. The debate was just an example:
Non-Trumper: If Joe had a cold, it looks like a staffer gave him Nyquil instead of amphetamines. He'd have paid for the uppers the next day, but it if ever there was a time to push yourself and pay the price later, this debate was it. He was horrible. Trump was his usual lying self, rambling nonsense, and looked like his usual re-animated corpse.
Trumper: Biden was awful; he's obviously going senile, unable to answer questions, losing his train of thought, weak.
Democrats are far more critical of their own candidate than Republicans are of their's, and that's how you identify the conservative lurkers. They're there, and they're not hard to recognize.
Oh ffs, it's non-binary. I can support certain policies while standing 10 down against others. I can look for alternative candidates without being Nazi, shill or troll. I'm fact, that mentality is from the GW Bush playbook, "if you're not for us, you're against us!" Which to be fair, I'm against politicians who rake in corporate, PAC and billionaire dollars, mainly because they're proud corporate and against we regular people.
But isn't that exactly what they were saying? If you go on X, for example, you can literally be banned for using the word "cisgender". Musk considers it a slur. Here, you can voice any opinion.
However there's a different between agreeing with some right-wing policies and being a full-on MAGA fascist. Full-on MAGA fascists shrivel up and die when exposed to any discourse that hasn't been heavily censored and editorialized in their favor. So naturally they'll avoid places where different opinions are shared. This alone is enough reason to call this place an echo chamber, because a (sadly) very prevalent set of opinions isn't represented here.
And I can, for example, get away with referring to MAGA fascists as MAGA fascists knowing full well that not a single one of those Trump-fellating pussies will say anything against me for it, and even if one does, the community will not have their back.
No these people are definitely leftist. Why would we criticize trump when we know there is no chance of altering his policy. Atleast with the democrats we might (and thats a big maybe) push them left by witholding our vote and being vocal about our opposition to genocide
They're here, you can find them if you look in the right places - however, most fediverse admins are technically apt and left leaning so Trump bullshit often gets folks banned and, when it doesn't, they usually get a very negative response.
There probably are some right-wing instances, but I'm guessing they all got defederated for... reasons...
Conservatives already have their own platforms e.g. truth social, twitter, 4chan, others
The very format of Lemmy is more egalitarian. For example, it gives an enormous amount of power to individual users to filter out unwanted content, and decentralizes content moderation over a variety of instances. This doesn't appeal to some right-wing ideologues who seem to value more hierarchical, centralized systems. Basically, Lemmy is more democratic (or has the potential to be more democratic) than other platforms.
Lemmy in general is developed and maintained by Communists, for starters. FOSS in general, especially FOSS social media, is a Leftist answer to already existing Capitalist Social Media.
There are right-wing instances like Exploding Heads, which is a Nazi instance, but they are defederated from every major instance.
FOSS in general ... and FOSS social media ... is a leftist answer to capitalist social media ....
This is how you can tell me you're a troll and know nothing of the history of personal computing.
[Tried to approximate the quote, couldn't copy and paste on mobile]
Edit: not sure if you were sarcastic or not, based on other comments. Either my instance or my mobile browser makes it hard to see everything in a coherent way.
There are/were some users and communities... a couple of Lemmy examples I remember...
Wolfballs was a conservative troll Lemmy server that was quickly defederated by major servers for their antics. They shut they server down after some years, way before Lemmy got to the size it is now.
Old_Geezer (@[email protected]) was a prolific poster and was a long time Lemmy member on Lemmy.ca, had some decent takes, but modded a geopolitics community where daily he posted the right-wing version of Russian propaganda, banning anyone that posted stuff there that went against that narrative. About 3 months ago, he was getting tired of the community pushback, eventually got banned by admins for his moderating behaviour.
[email protected] is an example of an active conservative community on Lemmy. You can see there is one regular poster and nearly all the posts are net downvoted. I request people don't go there just for the purpose of picking a fight.
Most community mods and site admins don't proactively remove conservative opinions as long as they aren't personal attacks or trolling, and that they're not being xenophobic in a community that's meant to have safe discussion for a group (e.g. anti-trans rhetoric in a trans-oriented community). However conservative opinions do get downvoted heavily by users, occasionally getting reported which sometimes leads to comment removals and bans. So it can be tiring to keep participating in a generally left-leaning network that rejects or is hostile to them.
Downvoting is peoples choice but yeah banning people or removing comments because you don't like their vibe is kinda counter productive to growing a platform for everybody.
We are literally filtering out people at the start. Not smart.
Generally that's how it goes on Lemmy, I find a difference with Reddit is that I see way more -20 or lower comments that have really stupid and disagreeable takes but they're there for everyone to see instead of getting removed.
The thing is that sometimes you have to filter out the jerks... or else the jerks will be all you have left. Growth is not the only thing you need to foster a healthy online community. You need values that make people want to be there. That's why the variety of enforcement styles, while it can create echo chambers, it also shows the Fediverse's strengths.
Luck perhaps? I don't think I have seen any politics post that didn't have at least one in the comments. It could also be that the majority of them are on instances not federated with the big boys. A lot of those I've blocked were on .ML or Hexbear. Among other undesirable things.
I blocked hexbear a long time ago, it's a right wing cesspool, I ditched .ml last week because of the trolls and tankies. It's too bad mods don't go after the obvious trolls/bots.
People are pissed about all the harm christianity is causing in the world. In a community that is more likely to consider religion to be the "opium of the people", you won't find much support for christianity, I'm afraid. Even if you're not part of the people using your beliefs as a weapon to oppress.
But downvoting posts just because they're Christian in nature is just purely religious bigotry. Anti-theism isn't much better, if not worse, depending on how someone follows their religion.
I think the hard-right people have mostly self-exiled to their own echo chambers like truth.social and other places that are Donald-used-and-approved. I think he's also active on Twitter again now that Musk has destroyed all content moderation on the platform. They follow their great leader and unless and until he starts posting his demagoguery on Lemmy they have no interest and no reason to come here.
Well Truth Social is running off Mastodon so they are kind of here. Just invisible (I don't tihnk truth social is federated with anything). When I was on Kbin I at least saw quite a few conseravatives. Can't really speak to this instance since on my end it all just appears as the same.
Its like on "conservative" mod shilling genertic GOP talking points with cherry picked facts and dozens of demoractic shills shilling their brain dead takes.
Republican ideology has no under pinnings beyond fuck poor for the benefit of the rich.
Ask these conservatives about maternity leave and want them get bent out of shape explaining away why we can't just have it 🤡
I've been accused of being a Trump supporter multiple times because of comments on Gaza... as I read top comment of a dumbass calling people who denounce Harris as confirmed Trump supporters....
Anyways it's the same in practically any niche technology, you just tend to see more leftists because they happen to be the ones creating and using said technology.
There's still a large portion of Republicans who use cable/satellite TV, but don't have internet besides their cellphone plan. They'd only come if lemmy became a popular de facto social platform like Facebook.
as I read top comment of a dumbass calling people who denounce Harris as confirmed Trump supporters....
i really hate this, same thing also happened to me in my country. i'm hating on the "B" candidate and people would assume i'm "A" supporter. i don't believe any politician at all.
In my estimation trump is more likely to avoid a war with china then Harris. So given two terrible choices I choose trump.
They both represent the purple party, and are basically the same for most issues, they are both pro genocide for instance.
But I don't find that a interesting topic of conversation, the captured us political system is broken and the way to address it is with voting system reform. That's the real conversation
update: thanks for the downvotes, its a good reminder of why i don't participate in the political communities here.
Must be difficult to live in a country where you think 49% of the people there are so dangerous.
You're applying peer pressure, you're trying to signal purity, but it's not a convincing argument. It just means I'm less likely to listen to your following argument after you've said terrible things about me.
regardless, this interaction Demonstrates to OP how toxic talking about politics can be on lemmy
Yes, voting reform is extremely important. The problem is Trump's view of voting reform is to restrict who can vote. The dems idea of voting reform is to make voting easier, and at the local levels, push for ranked choice or approval voting making 3rd parties actually viable. Voting for Trump is pushing us further from good voting reform. Harris may not be platforming voting reform, but at least she's not going to interfere with state level reforms like Trump will.
Fair enough. I see what you're saying, but I'm a single issue voter since I don't really care about the purple party. I just care about avoiding a war with China.