I am not criticizing them, I’m just out of the loop.
The Fediverse is home to a lot of young, tech-minded people distrustful of major corporations. The younger generations are more likely to come out as transgender due to greater awareness and acceptance of gender identity and dysphoria, and a decentralised, open platform is naturally going to appeal to communists, syndicalists and other left-wingers who don’t want some billionaire buying the next website they get comfortable on. And funnily enough, there are a surprising number of trans people in the tech sector, to the point where trans-flag socks have become a meme among programmers.
This seems like the most straightforward answer. But it doesn’t explain why people on the right haven’t come to the fediverse in proportional numbers. I know a lot of right leaning Libertarian communities, and for some reason they like cryptocurrency and FOSS but not the fediverse.
There are right-wing instances of Mastodon (gab, truth, and others), not to mention many Pleroma ones, as well as Lemmy (exploding heads, and probably others). It’s just that they get quickly defederated by everyone else for various valid reasons (usually hate and abuse, sometimes even child porn), so you don’t get to interact with them much. They just get stuck in their own bubble.
proportional
Maybe they just don’t have the actual numbers you’d expect from their outsized presence in the discourse, when they’re not being protected, or facilitated, or actively promoted by engagement algorithms or the individuals who own the other platforms.
(I’m pretty sure this is the case, but I’m too lazy to get sources just this minute)
But they have. It’s just they are so hateful and annoying that sooner than later they get banned or defederated. So they drop out of the face of the activity pub. Since no single entity can use an algo to force their views onto all users (ads or suggestion algos) they never resurface.
And of course crypto bros hate the fediverse, it doesn’t let them force their ponzi schemes with ads or SEOed posts. And most people here were initially pretty tech savvy individuals, almost all actively hostile against nfts and altcoins. As for Foss, they only like that the software is free, the freedom ideology is just lip service for them, they don’t actually believe. Case in point, Oracle. Foss? Free for me but not for thee.
People on the right don’t see the issue with neoliberalism. They are mostly fine with all the ads based system and corporate making billions out of the datas. Neoliberalism tend towards fascism with time. They will prefer fascism to redistribute profits to the workers.
The fediverse is a different point of view. You can defederate if it goes wrong with an instance what makes the profits by ad revenue impossible or too small. The big corps don’t have a huge interest in these platform without profits. People on the right will follow these corps and the platforms affiliated.
On the left, people will federate. I recommend to have a good read about the fondation of the unions in the 19th century. People of the diversity will historically be on the left rather than on the right. Again, for the profits, the neoliberals will prefer to oppress you as a minority for the profits than to have social and societal consideration for you.
You ends with the people of the left coming to the fediverse and the right on corps social media.
I am here and a big supporter of OSS, but many would call me right wing. I support living your life how you want privately and acknowledging different identities and sexualities, because if you aren’t flaunting it, how would I even know? But I also feel that sex, intimacy, etc should be private and should not be something discussed or displayed so openly, regardless of orientation, so many would label me as conservative.
You (and probably I) are going to get downvotes for this, but this is as reasonable a take as I’ve seen from any “conservative” so far. As long as you’re not actively promoting legislation to curtail or ban consenting adults from privately expressing their love for others in the ways they feel most comfortable. I hope you’re not against gender-affirmation therapies.
I’d argue the ‘young’ though. Polls I’ve seen, seem to show a huge 30-40 demographic.
i think that’s why the fediverse is doomed to perpetual obscurity. my reddit-refugee addictions have taught me that only reddit has the content that i like and that i need to learn how to appreciate stuff i don’t like to get my fix; i wonder how people get started on furry stuff. lol
Trans people and communists are nearly half of software dev. The other half are furries.
They’re 90% of FOSS development. Also, their “daily driver” is an old thinkpad running linux – often Arch.
Based off the amount of fury porn communities I’ve blocked, half seems very, very conservative. What’s the old joke, if a bomb went off at a fury convention the Internet would go down?
Not sure why this is such a common perception. Most of the software devs I know are pretty average people other than being computer nerds. I met one trans CS student in college but that was it.
Being trans is correlated with autism and you will find a bunch of autistic people in tech, because tech makes more sense to then than humans do. Same with things like videogame speedrunning.
If you don’t see that there is a greater number of trans people than in the general population you might want to look again.
mate he didn’t say in general
he said the devs of Lemmy
normie cs dorkies are chasing 12hr intern jobs at explotative upstarts
It’s more a Venn diagram which includes trans furries, communist furries and the elusive trans communist furry which has only been theorised to exist.
That’ll be partly down to the communist and transgender coders who helped lay the foundations for this place.
That’s a possibility. Since the platform started off on their terms, it’s harder to convince new people of opposing politics to join the community.
A big part is because things like the Fediverse are aligned with the goal of Communists. Do away with the profit motive and constant rat race so we can spend time doing and making great things.
Imagine if Facebook wasn’t interested in ad revenue and data gathering but truly sought to keep people connected and to facilitate communication. No bullshit algorithm, no manipulation to keep people doom scrolling.
On a technical level, federation is arguably just as compatible with libertarianism. Each instance is its own island nation, free to set its own rules while members vote with their feet in free association. That it hasn’t gone that route is more to do with the founding population than the technology.
it’s amazing what you see when algorithms aren’t deciding it for you.
Maybe it’s that homophobia and transphobia are so dominant on more popular platforms that there is a natural migration towards more free and liberal platforms. I always wondered why you see more and more racism, hate and such degeneracy the larger a platform becomes.
I think it’s because leftists are, as a group, a lot less toxic and hateful. They are happy to be a tiny community chatting with each other about being a trans furry communist all day every day.
The right on the other hand are, as a group, a bunch of anti social losers who thrive on hating and complaining about stuff. That’s not a sustainable platform because it’s either a miserable experience or it gets shut down for hate speech so they migrate around and attach themselves to heathier communities and complain about those instead.
leftists are, as a group, a lot less toxic and hateful
Definitely not my experience
leftists are, as a group, a lot less toxic and hateful
Ahaha! Hate is the core principle of Marx’s manifesto.
The issue I have with this is that publicly expressing their love for others is an extremely natural and normal thing to do. Talking openly about your opposite-gender spouse, kissing or holding hands with your partner, going out for a nice date - whatever. These are all totally normal things which people won’t blink at when a heterosexual couple is doing it, yet LGBT people can still be discriminated against for these behaviours. That’s not even getting into trans or gender-non-conforming people, who can be discriminated against simply for existing and presenting the way they do.
I don’t just want to ensure that LGBT people are free from explicit legislative discrimination. I want them to be free from social discrimination as well. Social consequences for being publicly gay are not acceptable, even if people aren’t in favour of more open forms of discrimination.
