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Which instances have the most diverse points of view?

Since Trump, I'm finding the Lemmy.world experience to be increasingly akin to an echo chamber and it's quite frankly starting to bore me. (Inb4, I'm a left winger and I don't like Trump, but I'm much more interested in a good spirited debate or novel points of view than I am in Orange man bad Nazi circle jerks)

If I wanted the same repetitive comments to be upvoted and any different opinion at all to be downvoted and even blocked/banned, I'd have just stayed on Reddit.

Are there any instances where different, opposing and novel points of view are celebrated and debated rather than simply derided and downvoted?

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  • If by "diverse" you mean "has western conservatives", then considering how the entire concept of the fediverse is progressive, you're not going to find many of them here. On Reddit, there's r/AskPolitics which overall leans liberal and is US centric but is more open to discussion than other subreddits. There's some other debate subreddits as well which you might be interested in. They're helpful for developing political views, but after that hearing the same BS from people who have fundamentally different values gets tiring and people leave so that's why there aren't many of those spaces.

    If you're open to other viewpoints that are opposed to both Republican and Democrat, leftist instances like lemmy.ml, Hexbear, Lemmygrad, and dbzer0 have that, and they can have very different stances on other issues as well (i.e. Lemmygrad vs dbzer0). They can still be echo-chambery (which is hard to avoid) but they also tend to have more users that are interested in intellectual debate.

    As far as what instance actually has the most diverse points of view, I'd say lemm.ee which federates with basically everybody and I've seen users there from all over the political spectrum. However, there's isn't much in terms of political discussion there compared to other instances.

    • Is db0 left wing? I felt like they lean closer to .world than left.

      • They claim to be anarchist and I've seen a lot of users from there criticize Democrats, although they hate Marxists also, so I'm not sure. They're also one of the few instances that federates with Hexbear, but they do block Lemmygrad.

  • Perhaps surprisingly when it comes to breaking the echo chamber and having diverse political points of view and approaches (on subjects like identity politics, intersectionality, geo politics, organization building, strategy...etc) I'd say even ML circles have a lot more of that than just vaguely leftist safe liberal stances (at the very least they might have novel ideas and no orange man bad meme).

    If you want more diversity of opinions you can expand in different directions, but I hardly see what good would be a place that has both fascists and anti-fascists for example and most of us are tired of picking internet fights. I suppose as long as you're aware of which kind of discussion you've more tolerance for you're good, but whether it's tolerance for the occasional black crime rate statistic or an esoteric graph of the falling rate of profit, you're not likely to find a space that has both.

    In general I'd go with Cowbee's recommendations though (for something that's still obviously fairly leftwing)

  • No.

    E: okay, it’s not fair to just tell you the answer when you’re already broadcasting a desire to read a bunch of stuff so here goes:

    If you want to see analysis and consideration of the right from an outside perspective you ought to be on hexbear or grad. Both instances don’t have near as many sky is falling posts or comments and trend towards figuring out why something is happening within the framework of doctrinaire Marxism Leninism or imperialism or at least what should be done to mitigate the effects rather than having a big ol hissy fit over it.

    If, as is implied by your post and comments (“ good spirited debate”, “ opposing and novel”, celebrated and debated“, “ worthy of discussion or debate”), you just wanna see people fight each other online then check out reddit, x (the everything app) and facebook where that happens often.

    If you have, and this is a reach, the desire to understand people who you think are on that right wing spectrum around you in real life, go talk to them. People love telling you what they think and when they don’t it’s because they know something you don’t or they’re up to something.

  • The only important thing, really, is that the instance you choose doesn't defederate with other instances for political reasons (except being literal Nazi instances). I find that lemm.ee users have a good mix of political expression ranging from Marxists to Moderate Conservatives. An account there, on lemmy.zip, or lemmy.ml is probably your best bet.

    • Yep, as long as you don't visit "local" and no instances are defederated, you simply get the whole fediverse, there isn't any other experience available at that point.

      • Well, one other thing is that instances will only fetch content from communities that at least one instance member is subscribed to. Every instance will have a slightly different selection of content because of what communities the existing members have subscribed to (and larger instances will typically have a broader selection of content, because they have more users).

136 comments