I fled Reddit due to the authoritarian mod craziness, but Lemmy.world seems infested with too much Communist craziness. I’m leftist, but communism is idiocy. Is there an instance that leans more democratic socialist but refrains from going off the deep end?
Are you an American?
I am. I’ve traveled internationally some amount. I am sure it varies by country, but the people who have a notable reaction to China/USSR-style communism, from outside the US, have a much stronger hostility to it than the US people I know. Because generally they have more experience with it.
US people don’t like socialism, and think it is “communism.” That part is true, but that wasn’t what I was talking about.
The idea that so many of the people on Lemmy are communists is what led me to think you’re an American. I am too, which is why I know the bias of the American political spectrum starts way more to the right than most of the world. So Americans tend to label ideas more left leaning than they really are.
The communists and tankies are about 90% on the lemmy.ml instance. The rest of Lemmy is left but most as are not communists.
Yeah. In case it wasn’t clear, I was talking about being able to encounter overt authoritarian communists at all on lemmy.world, not saying that most of the lemmy.world users themselves are communists. My reaction was very specifically to the word “communist” and not referring to the existence of anarchist / general working-class oriented stuff on Lemmy.
I think most of the lemmy.world users fall pretty much in the sensible region of opinion: Israel is bad, the CCP is bad, Russia’s war in Ukraine is bad. Gay people are ok. Unions are good and the US state is oppressive. Just normal stuff (within my own personal Overton window). Of course a lot of US people would see that as some horrifying communism, but that’s not at all what I was saying, although I can see maybe it came across that way.
Mostly I was saying that I can sympathize with this person coming to lemmy.world and seeing federated content that says “yay China, Tienanmen Square was exaggerated, all this stuff about North Korea is just giving them a bad rap because imperialism” and having this shocked reaction because of it. Whether or not it originates from lemmy.world, it’s weird to see it on lemmy.world or on the modern internet at all. Usually the free exchange of ideas can educate people out of that pretty quickly. I think it’s a symptom of (a) Lemmy having particular features which enable someone to create an echo chamber specifically for proliferating that stuff (b) the world as a whole has gotten more unhinged from reality and so it’s easier for counterfactual stuff to find a solid footing.