And the community that is here is, amazingly, somehow even worse than Reddit, on average, when it comes to being a hive mind that is wildly intolerant of any disagreement.
I personally disagree, mainly because the interactions have much more depth than the same 30 unfunny comments that people make on reddit ex: this. Don’t get me wrong it happens here as well, just way less. I also see people back claims up with evidence here way more, it’s not always valid evidence but at least an attempt is made more.
The thing I like the best is the lack of self righteousness (ironic I’m making this comment on this post haha) that reddit has, that was my personal biggest complaint there. Like on reddit if there is an animal in a video in any way shape or form you can almost always find someone screeching about animal abuse, even when it is obviously not.
I of course have bias in favor of Lemmy and this is highly dependent on the community. I will admit Lemmy is super left leaning, which I like, but definitely supports your hive mind argument. Even though I lean left I think it would be healthier for Lemmy to have more of a presence from the right. Unfortunately with how the political landscape is today I think it won’t be very achievable but hopefully when we hit the post Trump era divisiveness will ease making coexistence here more achievable.
My problem here is it being mostly left wing people, I am from the left, but I also want people from the other sides to be here as well, or else the whole thing will get one sided.
There probably are servers that try to be more tolerant or other opinions, but I think social media could be improved by something like in this video. I put a timestamp but TL;DW not just upvote+downvote, yes or no, but more diverse reactions like “partially agree”, “offtopic”, “you have convinced me”, “informative”, “misses the point”, etc.
So not just up and down, but left, right, diagonal and every which way to have a broader spectrum of human reactions instead of a binary one.
Additionally, add a more structured conversation flow depending on the community. A community for questions looks more like quora, a science community could maybe want options to add sources and have them aggregated in a thread, and so on.
I don’t care about that so much as the hyper specificity of not only “you have to be on the political left here” but “being to the left isn’t enough, you need to be this far left, and hold these specific views on politics, technology, etc.”.