Oh there’s plenty of propaganda here, pretty extreme as well…
Uh no. Lemmy is very much a groupthink entity. If you don’t agree with the hive, you’re berated and downvoted into oblivion.
It’s worse than Reddit in this respect.
Largely because Reddit was so much more diverse. Even ol hive mindey Reddit tolerated differing views significantly better than the shit heap that is Lemmy.
Never doubt your ability to be influenced by propaganda. The technique that broke the internet in 2015, lying and then confirming the lie more convincingly with a second account, is still very successful today.
It’s not as clever yet, thought, as the demographic is rather small. I was amazed that reddits’ world news the comments were almost uniformly not only anti Hamas but pro Israel. I mean not to pick a side here, and not saying theres not astroturfing here. However there’s more diversity of position, whereas the reddit thread felt almost strangly like everyone was just saying stuff, but not carrying any meaning. Felt like the last scene of body snatchers where even the protagonist turns out to be snatched, in a way.
The amount of sophistication is lower. There are people holding extreme positions but quite often they self identify and aren’t state sponsored most of the time.
I see propaganda all over the place on here.
Honest question. What kind of propaganda are you seeing on Lemmy? Nothing comes to mind.
I mostly see… Linux stuff. And I am not a computer person. Is that propaganda?
I’m so sorry you’ve been exposed to political views different from your own, I hope you’ll be able to recover from that one day.
Posts like this are it, even. Hurrdurr we’re so much better circlejerk is grossing me out.
Propaganda is an organization disseminating information they want others to believe, whether it be true, false, or the typical tactic, a mix of both.
You pretty much can’t avoid it on social media, the only question is whether the action is direct from the organizations or grassroots support.
This might be a hot take here, but I’d be open to instances running a limited number of ads with minimal tracking to generate enough revenue to keep the instance afloat.
It’s why I did use the official Reddit app at first when I started using Reddit. They can’t bleed money forever. But when they kept making the app worse and worse and worse that’s when I switched to third party apps. And after they killed those, I didn’t have any sympathy for Reddit because I was sick of their continued greed.
I don’t think ADS were ever the problem. The problem was the ratio. ORIGINALLY adblock plus, when it was a relevant adblocker had an option to allow less obtrusive ads to show. The rules they set for themselves there was pretty reasonable.
If Lemmy ever does have ads, I will tell everyone to avoid the platform like the plague. No ads. Ever. If your instance is too big to run on donations alone, it’s too big to exist and its members need to branch out.
Future platforms need to be programmed with a max number of users.
When I became financially independent I got Reddit premium even though I didn’t really use any of the features. Already had adblock and RES. I just wanted to support the site I spent hours on.
Cancelled that when they killed Apollo.
But I do agree that limited ads aren’t an issue… except for the slippery slope that’s happened. Just a few more ads… just a little more intrusive…
Speaking of monetization and propaganda, for your consideration, “Barbie”, now available on Blu-Ray and streaming services everywhere!
Lemmy is just as much an information warfare platform as anything on Reddit. The Israel/Hamas coverage has confirmed that pretty conclusively.
