I came here a few weeks ago after many years of reddit. Altogether I find discussions I enjoy, however, the posts and comments noticeably lean, well, tankie (I didn’t know that term before I came here). It’s not that I am looking for an echo chamber, but I also don’t want to spend my time reading propaganda. I’m really curious about a lot of things outside politics, as well as the opinions and arguments of reasonable people across the political spectrum, but I don’t want to listen to the boring canned lies of fascists and tankies. I realized that people celebrating communist dictators trigger me, and this is something I didn’t have to deal with before I started reading lemmy, I didn’t even know this type existed.
I also notice that accounts created just a few hours in advance come from other instances to brigade political posts. Because of how lemmy works, I can block individual users or communities, but not individual instances. Is there an instance that could be a “safe space” from this kind of brigading and tankie spam? Or a way to use the internet to read interesting things now that blogs died and then Reddit became whatever it became?
Real life. If you want moderate, complex opinions. Talk to real people. Not the bots and shills that populate this place.
You want an online community that allows both the right and the far right? That would be ALL OTHER ONLINE COMMUNITIES!
We came here specifically to get our own forum, where the centre left, regular left and far left are all allowed. This is a forum for the working class, not for the capitalists. And you capitalists can’t handle the fact that us workers for once get to have a forum of our own.
Who said this is a forum for the working class? I have not seen this mentioned anywhere. I’m inclined to think you are making this up. Why do you want people with extreme views (left or right) in your community?
(ive been told my writing style is a bit abrasive, but i got a touch of the tism’, and that can effect the “cadence” of how i write. so take that into perspective when reading this inside your head. im not hostile.)
“Who said this is a forum for the working class?”
its implied, considering almost 99% of the worlds population needs to work to make a living and to support their loved ones who cant. and the vast majority of the people who post here arent billionaire oligarchs, or petty bourgeoisie. its statistically unlikely. therefor, fair to say.
“Why do you want people with extreme views (left or right) in your community?”
radicals are at the forefront of change in every conflict. for better, or for worse.
today (in the US) to be opposed to fascism, is to be considered a “far left terrorist” or ANTIFA. another boogeyman made by the fascists to scare people away from “socialism” or the “wokes” or some other nonsense.
the new modern definition of “far left extremism” is a dog whistle used by fascists trying to play the “both sides bad” or “innocent centrist” take that ultimately leads left leaning people and fence sitters further down the road of fascism, for those who take it at face value. overuse of the word “tankie” as well, which has been used as a blanket term for socialists/communists a lot more in recent days. but most people dont understand its roots, or the roots of socialism/communism, and how they have changed since their inception.
unfortunately, the reason so many “far left” voices appear here, is because platforms like reddit started banning people because they called out fascism, and began communicating on how they should stop it. or simply joking about it. i personally am one of those people, i said elon musk did a nazi salute, and was likely a nazi to some degree. and i was perma banned within minutes. for “violent” content. (it wasnt in the slightest) so here i am. and honestly its quite nice, people are more level headed, kind, and willing to discuss things thoughtfully. without the “gotchyas” and hostile armchair intellectualism that is so rampant on platforms like reddit.
this is a platform of the people, each instance essentially ran/hosted by volunteers. working class people, like you or me. thats the basis of the fediverse. anyone can spin up an instance, some bigger/better than others, and choose to link with all/certain instances. some instances can be honey pots, filled with bots, AI slop. or real human beings, making real connections. who knows. its crazy out here. still small, quiet. but growing, and getting louder.
the best thing about the fediverse, is that if you dont like an instance. you can leave it.
but if you dont leave quietly, its always a little bit sus as to your real motivations.
OP seems to be confusing people with a distaste for fascism/general knowledge of communism/socialism, and the history that birthed them, for actual “tankies”
a common mistake made by the misinformed, and a common tactic used by the misaligned.
but id rather not make those assumptions, and assume its coming from a purely anecdotal view/experience of the world that i havent seen reflected in my own use of lemmy.
regardless, at the end of the day, its not left vs right, its up vs down. and i think thats the bigger zeitgeist here on lemmy
sorry for the wall of text. i hope this helps provides a bit more context.
It’s way past time to be reasonable about politics
Nowadays reasonable is radical. Moderate isn’t enough and conservative is poison
You know, OP is doing me a real service by posting this thread. I’m just scrolling down and blocking nazis right and left.
Don’t look for a specific moderate instance, instead block extremist instances. I’m not positive but I think that also blocks you from seeing posts by users of those instances even when they post to other instances, but I’m not 100% sure
From what I can tell, Lemmy started as wildly left but if you avoid the .ml areas, you’re going to get a much broader mix of views.
real moderate or usian moderate?
Schleswig-Hollstein
.world is the answer as long as you remove the reason able part.
If someone planned to divide and conquer lemmy, they did a fine job. You can tell lemmy is left leaning by how fractured everything is. And it’s mostly filled with leftist who hate anyone left from where they are.
There are no moderste Nazis. Get fucked.
WhY dO yOu SuPpOrT gEnOcIDe?
Reasonable Moderate Conservatives don’t exist, idiot
but not individual instances.
You can. If you’re using a Lemmy home instance, as you are currently (lemmy.world), in the Web UI, go to your user menu in the upper-right corner, click “Settings”, click the “Blocks” tab, and then you can choose instances to block in a panel there.
If what you want is “I don’t want auth-left stuff”, avoiding hexbear.net, lemmygrad.ml, and lemmy.ml can help. You aren’t going to get some kind of ironclad avoidance, but that’ll avoid the great bulk of it. Your home instance is lemmy.world. lemmy.world is defederated with lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net for exactly the reason you mention (in fact, I see people who don’t like lemmy.world because they consider it liberal, which they don’t like) so you already won’t be seeing stuff from the first two instances.
I don’t think I’ve personally seen fascist material on the Threadiverse (though there are some people with quite broad definitions of the term), though there are or were some far-right instances out there, based on defederation lists. Most of what little I’ve seen on the Fediverse seems to me to be on Pleroma, though I haven’t spent much time on non-Threadiverse Fediverse stuff.
moderate conservative
The home instance that I use, lemmy.today, has one user (@DonaldJMusk@lemmy.today) that posts a bunch of Trump stuff and a conservative community, !conservative@lemmy.today. I don’t know if your definition of conservative and his match up, but maybe you’d find it to your taste; it’s probably the closest to mainstream US, Republican material that I’ve seen with much activity on the Threadiverse. The instance isn’t going to be just moderate conservative and moderate liberal users though. But, if that’s the kind of community that you might be participating in, I’d imagine that he’d like to have more users.
EDIT: My own personal take is that the long term solution to having people with disparate positions on what content they want to see, above-and-beyond use of moderated communities and admin activity on instances, is to have “curator lists”, where people can basically “share” lists of blocks/subscribes/votes or something like that, and other users can subscribe to them. Then you have a list that — for example — excludes or includes content on various grounds without requiring effort on a per-user-who-wants-curated-content basis. I think that Usenet pretty much established that killfiles don’t really scale well in combating spam and stuff like that, because there was never a mechanism to share killfiles among users. Anyway, today, there isn’t support for something like that on the Threadiverse. I understand that BlueSky has something along those lines.
I enjoy that you gave a serious and helpful answer.
Posts like that are the ones that keep me here. There are some really dope people here who want to help and inform other people.
What’s sad is often content like this gets labeled as ‘evil’ and then brigaded by users who perceive it as a threat to furthering their political agenda, because anyone who isn’t on their side, or is remotely nice to anyone on the ‘other’ sides, is evil.
By lemmy.ml logic, if I help my elderly Trump-voting neighbor take out his trash, I’m also a Trump supporter. Apparently I’m if I was a ‘good person’ who was really anit-Trump, I’d beat him or slash his tires or something.
It would be important for people to understand that what separates good people from bad people is decency and basic human kindness, not political ideology. In reality, the good people are in the center, and the bad people are on the extremes. Yet, due to the polarization of public discourse, a left leaning person may be convinced that the good people are to the left, and the bad people are to the right from them. If they keep drifting towards the extreme, and keep thinking that everyone to the right is a bad person, eventually they will hate all the decent people in the center, while everyone still to the left from them is an actual monster. Needless to say, the same goes for people who start right leaning and keep drifting to the right. I wish more people realized that the enemies are the crazies on either side, not the moderates on the other side.
People don’t believe that anymore. They believe your goodness derives from your politics first and foremost, and everything else is secondary. And if you aren’t on their side you are the enemy and violence is justified against you.
I’ve dealt with this in real life too. Where I live if you aren’t a far leftist on some issues, people basically threaten you to your face or will socially exclude and character assassinate you. Because if you aren’t ‘with them’ you are the enemy.
And by the replies and attitudes in this thread are showing, you’re correct. This thread got hateful quick.
Not even lemmy.ml logic. A lot of people on Lemmy would call you a Trump supporter simply because you helped the neighbor. lol The extremism here has been getting really nasty lately.
In mod logs I am seeing a lot more banning for “advocating violence.” I guess the good news about that is that mods are banning people for advocating violence, so there’s that.
Wow, thanks, such a helpful response! I’ll try the web interface for instance blocking. Another sus instance I saw today was blahaj.zone. To clarify, I also didn’t see fascist stuff, I just mentioned it because I felt it important to point out that I also don’t want to see that kind of content. I guess I saw one too many “so you are not a fan of Stalin, you must be fascist” comment today.
hey, just so you know blahaj.zone is not a tankie instance, it’s an instance aimed at protecting oppressed minorities (it hosts a women-only community, protects LGBT+ users from bigotry, etc.).
I think it’s technically considered an “apolitical” instance, but the top community on blahaj.zone is vehemently anti-tankie, so I would say they’re the opposite of the people you’re worried about
got it, thanks for the explanation. I know nothing about the content and the general crowd over there, but some accounts registered there were definitely brigading political posts over .world, and not in a tasteful way. I don’t have screenshots or names because I blocked them. I’m not saying this is the instance’s fault.
What’s sus about Blahaj Zone? I’ve always found them to be nice people.
Well he’s looking for conservative content, and we’re a queer instance, so…
There are gay conservatives though. And there are conservatives who support LGBTQIA+ causes.
OP sounds like he’s just tired of the extremism of everything, not just left or conservative. So maybe he’s just a centralist or something.
Can do it through apps too.
ML is definitely everyone’s first and fav instance to block. A lot of the dumb shit will cut down very quickly just by getting rid of that one.
It’s so funny that the first instance Lemmy users ban is the one of the Lemmy developers lol
Funny in a way, not the first thing I’d say about it though. Makes complete sense, the whole idea of Lemmy and the fediverse aligns way more with leftist ideology. It was the first instance I blocked too, it’s very nice to be able to have a nice space with varied opinions without the one big extreme that’s objectively (IMO) bad.
the lemmy devs are very clear about their political views.
anytime you are clear about your political views, you are going to invite others to ban/hate/dismiss you on princple, because most people do not believe in a plurality of viewpoints in 2026.
It’s not really “funny” but ironic perhaps.
Funny haha vs funny peculiar
I tend to not block instances FWIW. I have blocked several communities and found that it works pretty well. For now, browsing /all in lemmy is my preferred view because we just don’t have that many people to keep content coming in the communities I have subscribed to. Plus, it’s more fun to see the variety. Lemmy is small enough still where it’s easier to “opt-out” than there is a need to “opt-in” to limit the noise.
I agree that blocking these instances will dramatically improve your experience.
Pretty sure that Donald J. Musk is a Russian Z astroturfer banned from half of Lemmy with multiple accounts under different aliases.
It might be worth adding that there is some backlash on BlueSky for their shared blocklists recently because they can accidentally catch reasonable people or be militarised to deliberately grab extra people. Or at least that’s my take. Personally I now consider a lot of social media along the lines of “if I might not feel comfortable with you around the wife and kids, then a block is reasonable like not inviting you to the next dinner party” and that having a block that you can click through removes a lot of these issues (collapsed post /comment with no title unless you click type thing)
Yeah, that’s why I mentioned votes — I think that it’d make sense to be able to maybe do something like build a score aggregated from multiple lists or something.
Another thing I’ve mentioned in the past is using this as a mechanism for tagging. The NSFW flag was a hack that Reddit put in because some people wanted to browse Reddit at work and some people wanted to post stuff that wouldn’t be considered acceptable in most work contexts. There are many, many different categories that someone might want to “tag” things on. Some people are fine with nudity. Some people are fine with gore. Some people are fine with suggestive content. Some people object to specific items in the above. I think that it will never be the case that everyone will manually tag their own content in all the same areas, but it could be the case that someone could create “lists” that one could subscribe to that could permit that sort of tagging; same mechanism.
Yeah, tags/labels are useful but do run into:
-
scaling issues
- you can end up with an overwhelming amount of tags
- if moderator adds tags then the post quantity can be overwhelming
-
abuse
- if poster side then not adding the tag
- if viewer side then adding it when the poster disagrees
-
disagreements
- what constitutes a given label - so most moderation arguments
Still, agreed they’re a useful addition
-
I barely can go a day i the fediverse without my pro-peace socialist democratic views being classified as facism or nazi-apologia.
Could it be cause you say shit like this?
Great answer. Lemmy lately has had a habit of labeling anything they disagree with as “fascist” or “nazi.” Heck, I’ve seen AP News articles get branded as fascist propaganda, just because they were neutral and didn’t ask for all republicans to be kicked out. lol
It’s worth noting that many people came from Reddit after being banned there or being too extreme leftist.
Anyone who calls Reddit conservative, is out of touch with reality, and just itching for fighting and revolutions. Reddit sucks, but it sure ain’t conservative.
So it’s great to see a well-balanced answer like yours.
