this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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Politics

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is Conservative/Right Wing opinions completely unwelcome on Lemmy? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by DeimosE2@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/politics@beehaw.org
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I don't have much of a problem either way as I don't think I'll be engaging in political discussion on this website past this post but it seems like any sort of non-left wing opinions or posts are immediately trashed on here. That's fine. There's clearly a more liberal audience here and that's okay. I just don't want Lemmy to become a echo chamber for any side and it seems to be that way when it comes to politics already.

Mostly making this post just to drum up discussion as I'm new here.

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[–] nob0dy@beehaw.org 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I've been a fence sitter and contrarian for most of my life. As a person that hates how both parties operate and I firmly believe that structural and systematic changes need to happen to the US system of governance. For that to happen we need those that have conservative viewpoints in order to create a balanced system in which we all can live in. It's disconcerting to see the vitriol espoused from both sides of the (US) political spectrum. It's feels like a pendulum swinging wider and wider threatening to throw itself off.

I'm a firm believer to the Forward Party's thesis that a minority of voters is now dictating policy being done to the detriment of the majority. I believe that the system allows for bomb throwers like Lauren Boebert to exist because she only has to represent a vocal minority. I believe that dark money from superPACs is manipulating public discourse to the point that rational discourse is almost impossible.

I guess what I'm getting at is that there are those that believe in the old guard republicanism and conservatism, the small government and fiscally conservative ideals/planks. We should allow those voices to speak up if only for forming ideas and policy that the majority of us can accept. I don't know, it just feels that as we grow more divided in our politics the harder it will be to create new polices and visions for a better Country. The adage from Clausewitz always comes to mind, "war is a continuation of policy by other means."

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[–] Dash@beehaw.org 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

They're not going to have the numbers to get any traction. Honestly, the bulk of the vocal conservatives are older and a bit brain rotted at this point. They won't want to learn or deal with something like Lemmy because it's not as easily out of the box on their cell phone yet, because there's not great app support. That demographic is almost exclusively mobile device users. Note; the above description is of your typical boomer esq white dude who you imagine taking a tik tok in his truck from a too low angle with wrap around shades on.

The actual alt-right and neonazis don't need lemmy, because they weren't really on reddit to begin with. The majority of them that are just on the surface of the alt-right are on 4chan, voat, and shit like that. Those that are a lot deeper are very tightly knit and on IRCs, telegram, onion networks; and are typically invite only or you need to know a guy who knows a guy kinda thing.

Conservatives have no need for Lemmy, they have their primary platforms still and can easily migrate. Reddit was basically all the leftist sphere had.

[–] rwhitisissle@beehaw.org 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

the bulk of the vocal conservatives are older and a bit brain rotted at this point. They won’t want to learn or deal with something like Lemmy because it’s not as easily out of the box on their cell phone yet, because there’s not great app support. That demographic is almost exclusively mobile device users.

This is directly contradictory to my own understanding of generational technology use. In my experience, young people (zoomers and younger) are almost purely mobile device users. Hell, colleges are actually having problems with newer applicants not really knowing how to use actual PCs for basic things since everything has either been done for them by mom and dad or all the services they ever gave a shit about were accessed through a mobile interface. Boomers, Gen Xers, and Millennials are more familiar with PCs than them.

This is one layer of criticism to your reply, the other is that it's a genuinely dangerous idea to think that conservative ideology is constrained to specific age groups. It's true the internet has become more "ghetoized" as time goes on and conservatives tend to concentrate in specific places rather than just being distributed across all services, like they used to be, but reactionary ideology is alive and well among Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z. It just doesn't look like typical Baby Boomer conservatism. And that's dangerous because if all you look for is Baby Boomer conservatism, you won't recognize it when different flavors of conservatism start closing ranks and forming meaningful voting blocks to get some lunatic like Trump 2.0 elected.

[–] Dash@beehaw.org 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Older people, millenial/genx/boomer don't necessarily want to learn new stuff just because they have competency with the tools they were required to use at the time. You can probably count the number of GenX accountants in corporate america who have made a Lemmy account on a single hand. You can probably count the number of genx rural blue collar workers who have made a lemmy account on the other hand. I obviously don't have any data to back this up, and we probably never will, but there simply isn't enough users statitically in the lemmy sphere for it to be untrue. No one this early is going to be browsing lemmy without making an account, and making an account requires some level of commitment or effort beyond mindlessly scrolling.

App usage on cell phones is the preferred method of doing things across the entire world. Mobile usage accounted for 44% of reddit traffic, and that was with reddit being better on a desktop than on a mobile device. Tiktok is borderline unusable on a PC, facebook, insta, SC, twitter, all of them the majority of use is mobile, not desktops.

My point remains, it's not that Lemmy is hostile to conservative viewpoints (although it is), it's that the extreme majority of conservatives, be they middle of the road, rural, alt-right, neonazi, neoliberal, whatever flavor you want, have alternative options already established that they can congregate towards.

[–] rwhitisissle@beehaw.org 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Older people, millenial/genx/boomer don’t necessarily want to learn new stuff just because they have competency with the tools they were required to use at the time.

I would say that resistance to learning new things is not necessarily generational. It might get harder the older you get, but if you're a baby boomer and are extremely familiar with how smart phones work, then you had to learn that technology as an adult. Like, the original iphone came out in like 2008. The youngest baby boomer would have been in their late 40s when they got their first smartphones. You don't get to say "old people don't like learning new technology" and "boomers only know how to use things on the smartphone" at the same time, because the material evidence for that is explicitly contradictory.

You can probably count the number of GenX accountants in corporate america who have made a Lemmy account on a single hand.

I have no metrics around user age groups cross referenced with occupation for federated social media. But I'm pretty sure you don't either, so I'm not sure where your confidence on that statement is coming from.

No one this early is going to be browsing lemmy without making an account, and making an account requires some level of commitment or effort beyond mindlessly scrolling.

What you're probably referring to is the absence of single sign on for Lemmy instances. Like how many people are used to SSO with Google or Facebook auth systems. That doesn't exist for Lemmy. You have to have an email. Y'know, like back in the old days of forums. The things Gen Xers, Millennials, and, yes, even Baby Boomers, made popular...which, since they have that experience already, would imply that Lemmy's sign up process would potentially be more familiar with older audiences than younger ones.

App usage on cell phones is the preferred method of doing things across the entire world. Mobile usage accounted for 44% of reddit traffic,

Okay....just to make sure we're on the same page: you do understand that if 44% of something comes from one thing, then 56% must necessarily come from something that is NOT that thing, and 56 is a bigger number than 44, right? Like, this specific statement directly contradicts itself.

My point remains, it’s not that Lemmy is hostile to conservative viewpoints (although it is), it’s that the extreme majority of conservatives, be they middle of the road, rural, alt-right, neonazi, neoliberal, whatever flavor you want, have alternative options already established that they can congregate towards

Your underlying statement was based in a foundational premise that conservatives were too old and/or stupid to figure out how to use Lemmy, therefore Lemmy was "naturally" insulated from conservative perspectives. And now you're saying they won't join Lemmy instances because they have better existing options. But then, why would leftists necessarily join Lemmy if they already have better options? Reddit is pretty overwhelmingly left leaning, if still controlled by ghoulish corporate overlords. Historically, the things that extreme conservatives have dealt with, namely getting shut down by their service providers, they've dealt with through self hosting. Here's a historical anecdote: one of the largest and oldest permanently self-hosted forums in the world is called Stormfront. It's a far right neo-nazi forum. They self-host because no one will host their content. Lemmy might be leftist, but they didn't "invent" the selfhosting game. The extreme far right were actually doing it first as a way of surviving in a digital sea that's grown gradually more benign, progressive, and intolerant towards their perspective over the years. My point is that instances like Beehaw, and others, need to be actively on guard against people like that, because the idea of Lemmy somehow being self-inoculating against them by design is the most dangerous possible kind of shortsighted complacence imaginable.

[–] Dash@beehaw.org 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I would say that resistance to learning new things is not necessarily generational. It might get harder the older you get, but if you’re a baby boomer and are extremely familiar with how smart phones work, then you had to learn that technology as an adult. Like, the original iphone came out in like 2008. The youngest baby boomer would have been in their late 40s when they got their first smartphones. You don’t get to say “old people don’t like learning new technology” and “boomers only know how to use things on the smartphone” at the same time, because the material evidence for that is explicitly contradictory.

Primates can use smartphones. We've made the format so user friendly we have other species which can meaningfully interact with it. You don't really "learn" how to use a smartphone, the designs are just that good now. Apple holds 57% of the cell phone mobile market, and their UI is nearly perfect for usability.

I have no metrics around user age groups cross referenced with occupation for federated social media. But I’m pretty sure you don’t either, so I’m not sure where your confidence on that statement is coming from.

There is like 70 thousand accounts across all of the lemmy instances, I'm sure people have multiple at this point to deal with limited federation. We have no metrics because this is all brand new and no one is collecting metrics, heck we don't know if anyone will even collect metrics, the whole thing could become a dead mall before someone gets around to it. My hypothesis, which is by definition just a hunch, is that we can make some pretty strong guesses on the demographic makeup of lemmy. I would suspect the makeup is predominantly center left people in the united states who likely work in tech of some fashion, aged 24 to 35, and the younger demographics are going to skew left/far left (lemmygrad) and LGBT (Blahaj/196). I obviously have no solid evidence of this, I'm just going off the activity levels of the various instances. The OP in this question was whether lemmy was actively hostile to conservative viewpoints, and my response to that was and still is there isn't going to be much of a conservative slant for lemmy yet because they have no reason to be here yet they have other social media that is infinitely more active than any lemmy instance.

Okay…just to make sure we’re on the same page: you do understand that if 44% of something comes from one thing, then 56% must necessarily come from something that is NOT that thing, and 56 is a bigger number than 44, right? Like, this specific statement directly contradicts itself.

I'm not sure if you missed the context I was going for, or are purpoefully misconstruding it? Reddit was a tiny website in the overall scheme of internet traffic wasn't it (this is actually a question, I'm pretty sure it was very small overall), the vast majority of the internet is browsed through mobile devices, reddit was an outlier. Twitter, snapchat, tiktok, instagram, facebook, all of them are browsed in the majority on mobile. The demographics skew even more towards mobile when you go world wide and not just the U.S. Mobile devices completely dominate the internet worldwide.

Your underlying statement was based in a foundational premise that conservatives were too old and/or stupid to figure out how to use Lemmy, therefore Lemmy was “naturally” insulated from conservative perspectives. And now you’re saying they won’t join Lemmy instances because they have better existing options.

Yes, because none of those conservative groups are a monolith, they're a much of a "big tent" as the left is in a lot of ways. Hardcore fascists aren't browsing tiktok, they're in smaller cells that converse in IRCs and other very hard to find niche groups. Run of the mill conservatives are mostly on things like voat, facebook, truthsocial, the_donald, basic run of the mill shit. There's a big difference between your average conservative genx father and someone who would be right at home on stormfront. Just like there's a big difference between your average live/laugh/love suburban mom who has a left slant and wants people to be happy, and a hardcore leftist that would gleefully put a billionaires head under a guillotine. There's nuance and niche group within niche groups within niche groups.

Also, remember dude we're on a very small instance, this isn't reddit, we're likely going to get to know each other relatively well if we frequent the same instances and conversations, this isn't reddit where we're going to get lost in a sea of accounts. Things are small enough that we'll probably recognize each other on other instances. Just like back in the day when forums and image boards were gaining big traction. Lemmy is where Reddit was 12 years ago, and where 4chan was 20 years ago.

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[–] bucho@lemmy.one 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

So, I commented earlier about why right-wing opinions are trash in general, but I realized that I never addressed the meat of your question, which was: "Are[sic] Conservative/Right-Wing opinions completely unwelcome on Lemmy?". Which, I've gotta say, is an incredibly stupid fucking question. Lemmy is a federated space, which means that anybody can set up their own server, with their own rules, and be part of the wider "Lemmy". A much better question, since you're posting on beehaw.org is: "Are Conservative / Right-Wing opinions completely unwelcome on Beehaw?", which is answerable based on knowledge of the administrator(s) of Beehaw.

But, really, any fascist dipshit with a spare server and an internet connection can start their own Lemmy instance, and they'd fucking love your stupid fucking Right-Wing Opinions.

So, in short, your question is stupid, and your opinions are trash. Thank you, and goodnight.

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