This rule applies only to the AskLemmy community. A ban on US politics posts in AskLemmy makes sense for several reasons:
US politics tends to dominate many online spaces already, drowning out other valuable discussions.
Political discussions, especially about US politics, often become heated and polarized quickly, which can detract from the thoughtful, contemplative atmosphere that open-ended questions are meant to foster. When people discuss US politics, they tend to take hardened positions rather than engaging in genuine exploration of ideas.
US political discussions often fall into predictable patterns and talking points, which goes against the spirit of having thought-provoking questions. The same debates tend to play out repeatedly, offering little new insight or opportunity for meaningful reflection.
A community focused on open-ended questions should ideally have a global perspective. US political discussions can make the space feel less welcoming to non-US users who might have fascinating questions and perspectives to share about their own cultures, philosophies, and experiences.
There are other communities whose purpose better aligns with discussions about US politics.
People need some communities where they can engage with others and NOT have to see or think about the recent election.
Nobody wants every community to be a free-for-all about every topic. Please feel free to discuss US politics in a relevant community about the US, about politics, or about world news.
[email protected] seems like a good place to redirect those conversations, maybe you could consider adding it to the sidebar, should the rule become permanent?
Instead of complaining can someone who dislikes this decision please just create a community like "AskLemmyUS", post a link here so people can find it and get on with it?
That's what I've told so many complaining people. If anyone wanted to they could make one and it would be filled with users in hours, just click create community. Hell tell the mods here to suggest people go there for those discussions, they'd probably link it in the sidebar. But someone has to do it. (And as a mod of a few other communities, someone else can take that one)
After today's defederation of discuss.online with hexbear.net, and the post Could Discuss.online become the go-to USA instance?, I created the [email protected] community (anyone with an established Discuss.Online account and reputation want to help mod it?). The instance admins don't want such controversial material like USApolitics, but AskUSA as a nice, friendly community to have neat discussions in is perfectly compatible with the mission statement of my home instance!:-)
I modeled the community name after [email protected] and made it a sister community, along with this one (any others that should be added?).
How the fuck is Lemmy supposed to serve as an open alternative to corporate controlled social media when the mods ban discussing one of the most impactful events of the day? You should be begging people to talk about politics here. Unsubbed. EDIT: AND BLOCKED. If I wanted to hang out in a fascist community I'd join twitter.
By giving people the opportunity to host their own instances and create their own communities with rules they like. This however does not mean that everything should be allowed everywhere. Actually this means that everywhere you go people make their own rules and if you dont like them, go somewhere else or create your own community.
This however is the main problem of social media in general. It creates circles of like-minded people where it is really easy to reject "other" thoughts and accept "our" ideas without much questioning. This is less a problem for people who are trained in critical thinking, but might be dangerous for more unstable people.
I'm just saying that a mix of different views is always good to some degree. Whether/how this should be done on Lemmy is a different thing.
Ridiculous copy/paste reply. You're not making a good case for people leaving corporate media for Lemmy. You're encouraging them to stay where they are.
I'm for making a megathread for people who really want to talk about it here but I genuinely don't understand why you're upset you can't talk about US politics everywhere in the platform. There are tons of communities for that. AskLemmy is for
open-ended, thought provoking questions
Instead, most US related posts are for venting and complaining. See these communities instead:
And dozens of similar communities on other instances. It's not censorship to ask you to go to use the proper channels, not everyone here wants to see US news everywhere.
upset you can’t talk about US politics everywhere in the platform
I'm upset that a moderator believes that banning the discussion of a major national / international event is healthy for the community. I could understand that for a niche community like Music but not one of the most popular general purpose ones. There's no reason this should be banned other than a personal preference. This informs me that the moderators of this community are not interested in an open platform for genuine discussion.
That's a bad take. The mods made the choice to moderate a general-purpose community in the first place. If they want a more narrowly-focused community, they should make one.
Because we're glad it is finally over after having deal with your election bullshit for the last half year? We made contingency plans for a trump win, so we acknowledged his win this morning, hope the planning is sufficient, and finally move on to something else.
Because you can go to literally any instance and create a community just for political drivel or even just go to the hundreds of other communities already dedicated to exactly that.
The moderation is completely out of hand. Instead of being happy we have a platform where we can discuss things outside of big tech platforms, we have people who think moderation is more important than letting people express what is on their mind, specially on this day.
Wish I could make the mods be a bit mature here, but probably not.
Whats next, banning people for discussing moderation? I would not be surprised at this point.
I've been here from the start so I'm just angry to see this kind of thing here. Whoever mod who did this should look in the mirror and think "is my behavior a plus or a minus for the platform".
I get that it's annoying, but we're sad, and angry, and scared, and we don't know where to go. Maybe someone will make us a community called "Now what?" where we can cry, shout, wallow a bit, and then make a plan for survival.
Yeah I think both are valid tbh. I get that a lot of people don't want to hear and and I get that a lot of people are upset. How do you compromise and help with both?
Sure, but... is "too much discussion" really a problem that Lemmy has? This is kind of a threatening time for some of us, especially if we don't have a lot of friends irl.
But would those 10 people make other 10 posts when they are overrun by posts unrelated to this community by people who don't want discussion and just want to vent their anger?
pointless. the entire lemmy will be on fire for a month or so.
I've blocked all US political communities. I've blocked 20+ users who posted US political content in other communities. When I now filter by most popular in the last 24h, it's only US election outcome content.
at this point i'm starting to believe that the reddit format just rots people's brains.
i don't know the reason behind this decision, maybe it was taken in bad faith or something, but the amount of people shitting and pissing themselves over this when there are already other communities better specialized for it is mind numbing.
... And now you can't ask anything about politics. There's was doubtless going to be political questions to ask, and politic adjacent (where do I move) that will all be removed.
And you can't even ask about effects on the world either! Gaza, Ukraine, NATO, trade, tariffs, etc. Are those going to be removed? All valid questions, but sounds political to me.
This makes me more likely to actually visit here. I'm sick of reading propaganda and people spouting propaganda from all sides, and I come to spaces like this for funnies, interesting topics, and so on. My political interests go elsewhere. I appreciate not having to wade through them here.
I just made a post (my first actually) about this today. I think it's better for the user to decide what they want to see and use filters rather than block posts entirely.
Honestly I don't get the hype about the US presidency, like sure, it was kinda shocking at first how Trump won, but after that I accepted it. I'd rather listen to other issues than the same thing over and over again.
I also find it wierd that many of the fellow Australians around me know more about American politics than Australian politics, likely just because our media covers it to no effing end, sure, do one news story, but not a fucken bajillion.
Community for political discussion: [email protected] , mods please feel free to post this anywhere if you'd like to avoid the political posts/questions :)
Idk what the mod team's philosophy is on incorporating member feedback vs shaping it to mod teams vision, but fwiw, here's mine.
I don't want to see every other post being about Trump either. But I also want conversation to happen. The compromise solution seems to be a mega thread; conversations continue without flooding everyone's feed. For however this temp rule is in place, delete offending posts and redirect to the mega thread.
Doubling down on the censorship of inconvenient truths will surely help after your whole instance demonstrated the folly in censoring inconvenient truths. /s
Remember: if you think you have to censor the truth about your supposed left wing candidate of choice, they’re probably NOT actually very leftist at all and you’re doing fascist shit directly for a fascist.
If you refuse to allow people to speak the truth, you’re not even doing a decent job, pretending to be one of the “ good guys”.
White noise that sends missiles and bombs to kill millions around the world. It’s very dangerous white noise is it not?
If the rest of the world is educated on our sham political system then maybe people like you can educate the identity politics dupes that I have to be censored by when I point to rampant corporatism in an impotent attempt to wriggle my way out of this wage slave trap.
For example, here’s an image I love to point to that shows why the US is so stupidly tribalist:
It shows what needs to be done to try and fix this shithole country.