Mastodawn

What instance has mostly reasonable moderate conservative/liberal people?

What instance has mostly reasonable moderate conservative/liberal people? - Lemmy.World

I came here a few weeks ago after many years of reddit. Altogether I find discussions I enjoy, however, the posts and comments noticeably lean, well, tankie (I didn’t know that term before I came here). It’s not that I am looking for an echo chamber, but I also don’t want to spend my time reading propaganda. I’m really curious about a lot of things outside politics, as well as the opinions and arguments of reasonable people across the political spectrum, but I don’t want to listen to the boring canned lies of fascists and tankies. I realized that people celebrating communist dictators trigger me, and this is something I didn’t have to deal with before I started reading lemmy, I didn’t even know this type existed. I also notice that accounts created just a few hours in advance come from other instances to brigade political posts. Because of how lemmy works, I can block individual users or communities, but not individual instances. Is there an instance that could be a “safe space” from this kind of brigading and tankie spam? Or a way to use the internet to read interesting things now that blogs died and then Reddit became whatever it became?

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tal 2d ago

but not individual instances.

You can. If you’re using a Lemmy home instance, as you are currently (lemmy.world), in the Web UI, go to your user menu in the upper-right corner, click “Settings”, click the “Blocks” tab, and then you can choose instances to block in a panel there.

If what you want is “I don’t want auth-left stuff”, avoiding hexbear.net, lemmygrad.ml, and lemmy.ml can help. You aren’t going to get some kind of ironclad avoidance, but that’ll avoid the great bulk of it. Your home instance is lemmy.world. lemmy.world is defederated with lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net for exactly the reason you mention (in fact, I see people who don’t like lemmy.world because they consider it liberal, which they don’t like) so you already won’t be seeing stuff from the first two instances.

I don’t think I’ve personally seen fascist material on the Threadiverse (though there are some people with quite broad definitions of the term), though there are or were some far-right instances out there, based on defederation lists. Most of what little I’ve seen on the Fediverse seems to me to be on Pleroma, though I haven’t spent much time on non-Threadiverse Fediverse stuff.

moderate conservative

The home instance that I use, lemmy.today, has one user (@[email protected]) that posts a bunch of Trump stuff and a conservative community, [email protected]. I don’t know if your definition of conservative and his match up, but maybe you’d find it to your taste; it’s probably the closest to mainstream US, Republican material that I’ve seen with much activity on the Threadiverse. The instance isn’t going to be just moderate conservative and moderate liberal users though. But, if that’s the kind of community that you might be participating in, I’d imagine that he’d like to have more users.

EDIT: My own personal take is that the long term solution to having people with disparate positions on what content they want to see, above-and-beyond use of moderated communities and admin activity on instances, is to have “curator lists”, where people can basically “share” lists of blocks/subscribes/votes or something like that, and other users can subscribe to them. Then you have a list that — for example — excludes or includes content on various grounds without requiring effort on a per-user-who-wants-curated-content basis. I think that Usenet pretty much established that killfiles don’t really scale well in combating spam and stuff like that, because there was never a mechanism to share killfiles among users. Anyway, today, there isn’t support for something like that on the Threadiverse. I understand that BlueSky has something along those lines.

Pleroma (software) - Wikipedia

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DougPiranha42 2d ago

Wow, thanks, such a helpful response! I’ll try the web interface for instance blocking. Another sus instance I saw today was blahaj.zone. To clarify, I also didn’t see fascist stuff, I just mentioned it because I felt it important to point out that I also don’t want to see that kind of content. I guess I saw one too many “so you are not a fan of Stalin, you must be fascist” comment today.

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dandelion (she/her)

hey, just so you know blahaj.zone is not a tankie instance, it’s an instance aimed at protecting oppressed minorities (it hosts a women-only community, protects LGBT+ users from bigotry, etc.).

I think technically the instance doesn’t take sides in terms of political ideology and is thus not a “political instance”, but the top community on blahaj.zone is vehemently anti-tankie, so I would say they’re the opposite of the people you’re worried about

You can read more about blahaj.zone’s intentions as a space here:

lemmyverse.link/lem.lemmy.blahaj.zone/…/14736607

First and foremost, blahaj zone lemmy exists to give a space for queer folk to exist, with their needs explicitly protected as the highest priority, and with a particular focus on the needs of gender diverse folk. Most lemmy instances are not run by trans folk, and whilst many are still inclusive, they don’t always prioritise our needs. Others barely consider trans folk, and react only to the most blatant of bigotry.

We are not a political instance, however political communities have a space here, as does any community that is actively protective of the needs of queer and gender diverse folk. Given the impact of politics on gender diverse folk, that means lots of dialogue and strong opinions exist, and as long as those opinions are honestly held, and not bigoted or exclusive, people are welcome to have and express those opinions here.

For what it’s worth, I am a member of the Greens Party in Australia. I have no time for the middle ground politics of the Australian Labor party, let alone the right wing beliefs of the Australian Liberal party. Yet a community of queer Labor Party aligned folk would fit on blahaj lemmy, because the parties ideologies, are not explicitly anti queer. A community aligned with the Australian Liberal party likely would not have a place here, unless the goal of the community was to work at actively challenging the anti queer policies of the party.

basically you’ll only have issues with blahaj.zone if you’re transphobic, homophobic, etc.

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DougPiranha42 1d ago

got it, thanks for the explanation. I know nothing about the content and the general crowd over there, but some accounts registered there were definitely brigading political posts over .world, and not in a tasteful way. I don’t have screenshots or names because I blocked them. I’m not saying this is the instance’s fault.