Ask Lemmy

There aren't two sides to every issue, reasonable people can't differ on everything. Your trump example illustrates this perfectly: at this point no reasonable person has a positive view of him.

Stay out of politics. Enjoy Lemmy.

You will never be able to stop people having biases, I think we have learned that thus far. It is really hard to prevent no matter where you go. What Lemmy allows the individual to do is remove those constantly negative hate groups from being visible for them. Lemmy gives us options, you can block users, communities, and instances. Well that's great and all, but maybe you still want to see political content, just not negative stuff constantly.

Part of being federated is that we can have multiple politics communities of the same name on many different instances. If you have a power mod suppressing one community, you can go to another or create your own under your rules that you see fit. Some moderators and user dynamics do a really good job at removing biases as best they can for the sake of good journalism.

It is no easy feat to accomplish that, but Lemmy (and the fediverse in general) makes it possible to accomplish. You can't say that for many other social networks.

Your comparison is horrible tbh.

But what you're asking underneath it all is simple enough.

Lemmy isn't a single entity. It's dozens of instances (well, dozens of public ones big enough to notice), with multiple communities on each.

There is a bigger section of users that reject alt-right matters, which is an "oh no. anyway" situation because most instances also reject the left equivalent (tankies) with similar fervor. But there's communities that are quite friendly to non extremists that are what you'd call conservative overall, if you go looking. But the major instances are run by folks that lean liberal, progressive, and/or socialist. It's just a fact.

I hate to break this next part to you though. Any political based community, subreddit, or forum is going to be a dumpster fire of biased bullshit. And that goes for any segment of political ideology. That's because people that are emotionally invested in identity politics are nigh unto religious zealots. And they're the most likely to make posts and comments in those places. They're also the ones most likely to shoehorn in political bullshit where it doesn't belong.

That last part is a much bigger issue because it's harder to avoid.

But, dude, don't get it twisted. The whole trump part is to be expected. Anyone not expecting high vitriol regarding him is silly. Like, he's divisive intentionally. He just got indicted, so it's current news everywhere. This means the posts about him are certainly going to focus on the crimes he's accused of, which is going to be "negative" if you're a supporter. If you're neutral regarding him, it's still going to read negative because the shit he's accused of is pretty fucking negative lol. You can't report on someone accused of serious crimes and it not skew negative unless you ignore anything about the news that's factual.

But I'm not going to get started on the whole "moderator and suppression" bullshit because it's utter bullshit.

I always wonder about these 'omg bashing on trump' questions. It's because he's a highly confrontational jerk who makes a living from being controversial. To extend your analogy, yeah, if Chevy uh, was constantly insulting 60% of the country while ripping people off and tried to overthrow the government, people would probably be complaining about them in the same way.

Lemmy isn't a platform at all. It's a piece of forum software.

The platforms are the individual instances - lemmy.world or lemmy.ml or lemm.ee or whatever. There's well over 1,000 of them total. And they range all the way from extreme left to extreme right, and from rigidly constrained to entirely open.

And since it is the case that there are well over 1,000 instances, each of them privately owned and managed by whatever standards the owners prefer, there is no mechanism by which any particular bias can be maintained at anything above the instance level. That necessarily means that any lemmy-wide bias you might see can only be organic.

You might honestly think about that, and what it says about the ideology you're trying to pretend you're not defending.

Server owners and admins, and communities creators and mods can set the tone of the communities they manage, of course.

If you think a car community is too ford-leaning you can look for or create another one, if it's the whole instance then subscribe to another instance cars community (I'm subscribed to the same communities from several instances, I guess it has to be pretty common), or even make an account in that other instance just in case the Chevy folk start hanging out with nazis, as they always end up doing, and the rest defederate from them.

Edit: oh! And you can block all the posts with a specific site as a source, so you can take away everything from fordnews.com and not see it anymore

It feels like you're fishing for a "go fuck yourself, and your poorly disguised concern trolling" comment. Congrats, you've caught one.

And how is that any different from Reddit? If you waltzed into r/politics, you would have basically the same thing you just described.

OP, if you legitimately cared about getting a balanced view, then get a RSS reader and read news from either Associated Press and Reuters, or read news from outlets like Fox and CNBC. You can also just look for a right-leaning Fediverse instance because I can guarantee you that you can find one.

Is Lemmy a biased platform?

Yes, but not biased enough IMO

I'm a trans woman. On the fediverse at large, transphobia isn't tolerated. It gets shut down hard. Here on lemmy and kbin, it can go either way. Some places are happy to let transphobia slide, which means we have to deal with more hate on the day to day than we do with the rest of the fediverse.

I'd be happy to see more bias towards not indulging transphobes and their hate.

I didn’t read your whole wall of text but lemmy does have a strong alt-left / marxist / anti-western population

It's a cross-section of not of society but of the popular Lemmy instances' respective user bases. You could argue all day about merits of right-wing philosophies and policies and you'd still be heckled into oblivion for this reason.

I'll second what others have said: if you get heckled into oblivion by people who refuse to listen, go join or create another Lemmy instance and find some who will.

Welcome to the Fediverse!