I try to be mindful of my Lemmy image/persona since I try to be supportive and educational here. I don’t have a problem with sharing my personal beliefs, but I try to keep it constructive and not too judgemental.
I’ve spent a lot of time cultivating the community where I spend most of my time posting content to, and I like all the comments people share on a daily basis because it’s a positivity oriented community.
Between things in real life and fighting feelings of burn out here, it’s been a bit tougher to stay motivated. One thing I’ve been noticing more lately, and I’m not sure how to deal with it, and I’m curious how you all deal with it.
If you have regular commenters that you like in your community, but you see them being kinda shitty in other communities, does that affect you?
I know there are stressful things going on just about everywhere, but it’s tough when I see people I look to for positivity in return for my work having bad takes or saying things that make me feel less happy about them.
The broadest recent example is probably the Luigi/United Healthcare assassination. Without getting into a whole thing, I don’t support it the way many have expressed here, but I can empathize with the reasoning behind why Luigi has broad support. But I see people I like saying what I feel are pretty hateful things, and I’m having a hard time separating what they show me of themselves in our positive space with what I’m seeing of them in the general Lemmyverse.
I don’t know if I should just ignore it, but I don’t feel there Is really any ideal way to discuss too much as I don’t want to alienate people from my content. I don’t use any alta as that just seems like too much work, but now I kind of want to avoid people a little bit.
Just curious if any of you go through anything similar and to see how you deal with it.
If you have regular commenters that you like in your community, but you see them being kinda shitty in other communities, does that affect you?
It’s only an opportunity to remember that we’re people, with many flaws. And that’s true for every single one of us. No exception.
I don’t know if I should just ignore it, but I don’t feel there Is really any ideal way to discuss
My approach is that if a message is not addressed to me and if I have nothing nice to say (or if I feel like being judgmental, like you said), I’d rather say nothing. And if the message is addressed to me, well, it’s more or less the same: if I have nothing positive to say, I will not reply and ignore it. If the person insists a little, I will say ‘sure, thx for sharing your opinion’. If they insist more, I will block them.
as I don’t want to alienate people from my content.
I don’t worry about people disagreeing with me. In fact, I quite appreciate diverging opinions as they can be opportunities to learn new things and to revise my own certainties. But I also don’t care at all about alienating anyone that I would consider a pain because I don’t think there is much (new) to learn from that kind of pain.
Quietly moving along has been the approach I’ve been doing. I try to keep in mind that I only really interact with them in a very brief sense every now and then, so I’m only getting the tiniest sliver of who they are when they interact with my posts. They’re their own people with their own thoughts, and since there’s no face-to-face interaction, I think I just project a bit too much personality on them sometimes.
I don’t think I’ve ever responded to any of them, because I enjoy the interactions they have with me that do pertain to me and what I am interested in sharing, That is a success that I have at that point, and the likeliness that I will change someone’s opinions on politics or whatnot isn’t very high, so it’s not worth it.
With some I’ve interacted with on a daily basis though, I guess I just wish they would always be smart and funny like they are in my space, which is almost purely positive, all the time. It’s unfair to expect them to be happy and rational though when they’re in a thread talking about things that make them mad though, It bothers me to see them get upset, even if we’re not friends in a traditional sense, I feel I’ve gotten to see them as good and happy people and I don’t like something making them be angry/upset/sad/etc.
I’m fine with people disagreeing with what I say though. I try not to throw around too much opinion and generally will have sources for things I share, so if they turn out to be wrong, I really do wish to know about it so I can be properly informed. I like to learn in general, so it’s important to be able to vet the facts I’m finding.
I try my best to be a positive voice but I’m also tend to by cynical on many topic. If you catch me be rude or negative in a non-constructive way, do not hesitate to talk me out of it. It easier to be better as a group!
I’ve only ever seen you be très chouette! You do a lot of great community building and watching you do your thing still makes me happy!
A take it as a big compliment (^_^) Thanks. But I’m not doing half of what you and so many other people are doing…
I feel you’re always trying and promoting new things, and you’ve supported the things I’ve tried to do for a long time. Whenever I see your name show up, I know it’s going to be something positive.
You do a good bit more than maybe people and you and the other people that regularly interact with my content keep me doing what I do.
I’m glad to hear it. Keep the good work yourself. You’re the kind of superuser Lemmy needs to grow to something meaningfull.
I’m always glad to see you all get enjoyment out of it. I’m glad I found a place where I can contribute something positive.
Only option is to ignore and stick to your community/instance rules and overall vibe.
I occasionally have known tankies comment in one of the communities I am modding. I just don’t engage.
And being Ukrainian I have a good reason to be very negative towards tankies.
For what it’s worth, I find it helps to contextualise things for yourself. At the end of the day, it’s not that big of a deal.
Good point about contextualizing. People are allowed to let off steam sometimes, and with only text to go by, people could be serious, but they could also just be working through frustrations.
We all have our share of bad takes, and I should only put so much weight into random things some relative strangers say. I delete a lot of posts before sharing because I decide I’m either edging into things I may not understand as much as I think, or that what I’m about to say may have me come off as confrontational. Different people just have different concepts of self control.
I think one way to think about it is your positively is shared at least in your space even with people who you feel aren’t good all around. People are complex and different environments bring out different aspects of them
This is very true. The majority of what I share can be appreciated at surface level, but the people that actually interact and participate I like to think are there to be open minded and to learn new things.
If I’m looking to teach people things, the audience will be coming from all different backgrounds and opinions, but my primary goal is to show them new things and to get them to think more critically about them. Even if I’m not in agreement with them on things at times, they are still taking time to show an interest in what I’m talking to them about. They deserve to be free to say what they want, but there’s no more obligation for me to have to agree with it than there is to listen to everything I have to say.
I’ve had to block a lot of communities in order to maintain my sanity. Like, others are free to do as they choose but I should have that freedom as well too, yeah?
It’s the Nazi bar problem: how do you be friends with a Nazi, who is nice to you most of the time? (The difference here is that Nazis were and neo-Nazis are Alt-Right, while the ones we are talking about here are Alt-Left, but is there all that much difference, really? both are okay with murder as not the last but somehow rather almost the first resort, having no clue about the horrors that they would unleash upon society if they got their way - and just exactly like the Alt-Right, their way is the only way, no openness to discussions to the contrary).
Highly ironically, Reddit used to have this problem, and do you know what they did about it? They banned the leftist extremists, enticing them to create Lemmy as a Reddit replacement. i.e., this is not merely a Nazi bar - it’s their bar, while we are the freeloaders here. I find that thought highly interesting…
Though I don’t know if I’d absolutely put it how you did, there is an element of truth I think it’s hard to argue. This place was started by hard Left ideologues, and I learned quick that American far leftists aren’t near as far left as those from other places sometimes! I do feel rather centrist here compared to most places in my real life.
Everyone is fairly free here to speak their mind, whether that’s something brilliant, stupid, or somewhere in between.
I was very late to Reddit and avoided most of the drama there, but even though I don’t agree with much of the Lemmy founders’ political leanings, I do respect that they made this place viable and that the rest of us get to use it.
I also agree extremists to either direction start to look more alike the more extreme they go. The environment is one of my highest priorities, but things like eco extremism I can sympathize with, but I don’t want to see people killing each other to protect it either, and I don’t know how many laws I’d personally be willing to break to do it.
I did watch How to Blow Up a Pipeline today though, and I didn’t really feel bad about much anyone did in that… They specifically made sure they didn’t hurt anyone or the environment, though some characters debated if hurting people causing the problems was ok.
If you think about it more I suspect you will come around to my way of thinking there. For one thing, the form of argumentation looks precisely identical to those often used by the Alt-Right, while for the another the content looks at least functionally identical to it as well. e.g. here’s an image from a post on lemmy.ml that was shared just prior to the election:
The translation here is “bOtH sIdEs SaMe” - which actually worked to sway the election of the USA. Over time I’ve heard the argument shift from “we’re not the Alt-Left”, to “okay so we’re the Alt-Left, but you don’t have to worry b/c unlike the Alt-Right, we have no actual power”… but if such messages are swaying the election of the nation with the most nuclear warheads on planet Earth, then isn’t the latter no longer true?
Question: and how is this not likewise advocating for genocide?
(shared in this post to !memes@lemmy.world 7 days ago)
Answer: b/c murder is okay when our side does it.
And how is this post to !memes@lemmy.ml any different at all from those style of posts that I used to see on Hexbear.net? Reaction-baiting, spoiling for a fight, picking on points of contention for the purpose of “dunking” on one’s opponent, rather than attempting to find common ground and have discussions of greater depth and substance.
100% of the people that I’ve mentioned Lemmy to have outright chided me for having done so, b/c of the extremist content. And it’s not just “over there” - by federating with these instances, we choose to host it over “here” as well. e.g. a poster on the wall of a Nazi bar may have been constructed thousands of kilometers and multiple nations away, but if it was transported to you and accepted by you and pinned up by you in your bar, then it is “you” who are advocating for that (Pro-Nazi) message?
I’ve already given up checking Lemmy while at work - I don’t want these server names appearing in those logs, in case something happens and they start wondering why I am visiting this Alt-Left space. *I* am not planning on doing anything illegal like murdering a CEO, but if I am hanging out at this “Nazi bar”… I can well understood why someone might question if I myself am a “Nazi”, or in this case the Leftist equivalent?
We’d all probably prefer quick answers to our problems, and an authoritarian will offer that. I suppose it’s all well and good when an individual’s opinions and goals are in line with the authoritarian, but what about everyone else? My extended family largely believes things very much the opposite of what I do. They’re not what I’d consider bad people, I think they just got sold lies. In some type of civil war situation, we’d be on different sides, and why would I want that? I want them to learn and improve, not to die. You can have people wanting to make some type of utopian auth-left state like House from Fallout or Tony Stark in Age of Ultron, but when you turn over that much power and control to one person or a small group of people, what happens when your vision and theirs no longer line up?
I’ve given up on reading much of anything about Trump and Co, because they don’t keep their word and just do what they want anyway, so there isn’t much point to reading about what they’re “going to do” before they do it. The left media complains about it, but won’t say what they’re actually going to do about it, and I don’t see anyone promoting any new people to rally behind. What are they offering? I’m already mad at the alt-rights, so I don’t need more help being frustrated. I’m craving solutions, not more rage-bait.
I don’t feel the need to discuss the pros and cons of all things like if Nazis can be good or if climate change is real, but if people from differing stances want to discuss things while being receptive to other views, that’s the type of thing I can get behind. Nobody is going to work together starting at a place of extremism. But if we discuss the actual concern, the environment, racism, economics, social equality, immigration, what have you, we can understand each other, look for root causes of frustrations, and come up with realistic and implementable solutions. I just don’t feel that from hardly any source right now.
And that’s the problem with modern “leftism”: it is not actually “leftist”. The states lifted up as being such (Russia, China, North Korea, etc.), and the spaces put forward as espousing those belief structures (hexbear.net, lemmygrad.ml, lemmy.ml, midwest.social, etc.), are the very ones that look to me to be the MOST authoritarian instances across the entire Fediverse? Someone can debate all day long how “oh no, the USA is doing genocide!?”, but just try saying “oh no, Russia is doing genocide?!” or “oh no, China is doing genocide?!”, or on midwest.social merely downvoting a post from the admin there, and see how long until you are banned. That’s authoritarianism, regardless of whatever words are used to describe it.
Hence why I have started taking to calling it the “Alt-Left”, b/c it’s not the real Left, it’s an “alternative” one, which has wrapped so far to the Left that it is all the way Right again. Eating its own, excluding rather than tolerating people and ideas, advocating for violence - including literal genocide (e.g. Uyghurs + Ukrainians). Watching Innuendo Studios’ The Alt-Right Playbook, play for play the tactics of the Alt-Left are precisely identical. BoTh SiDeS sAmE for instance has no logical basis in factual discourse, but to someone not paying attention, if it is said often enough, can take on the seeming resemblence of truth? I can’t tell you how many times someone with an account on lemmy.ml ignores >90% of what I say, hyper-focuses on one tiny bit, manages to get that wrong too, and blatantly tells me the exact opposite of what they just told someone else mere minutes ago (cough Cowbee cough). Such “control the conversation” tactics are just too childish for me to enjoy engaging with anymore these days, and yet sadly are all too common (I can only assume that it somehow “works” inside of their echo chamber? or else that they simply don’t care yet keep doing it anyway. you really can get a LOT of mileage out of just sticking to your position no matter what facts are presented to the contrary, b/c a lot of people just give up arguing against that, mistaking that stubbornness for a form of “strength”).
Identically then to the people who are inside the Alt-Right movement - but who never seem to actually be aware of that? - the people in the Alt-Left are perhaps kind-hearted, well-meaning, and may e.g. show up to try to overthrow a government (all while claiming to be there to “defend the Constitution”), but it’s not their intentions that I take issue with so much as the fact that they need to read a book prior to going to such an extreme (or two, or even three - and yes, I am sure that they think that they have, but I mean here that it would be helpful to read all the variety of SIDES to an argument, before claiming to fully “know” what to do there?). It does not help that the internet is anonymous and thus that I could be arguing with a literal teenager, or someone with the intellectual equivalence of such. It always comes down to: they can do whatever they want, but so too can I, and yet the burden therefore falls onto me to decide what to do, since they apparently refuse to have the discipline themselves to read or to understand things prior to pushing for their chosen philosophy.
I’ve been open to most of the ideologies, but nobody ever presents a practical way to implement them. No one is up for mundane things like general strikes or labor collectives, so it’s hard to convince me we’ll see a Communist resurgence or horizontal power structure implemented at large scale anytime soon. I’ve no objection to the ideas behind those things, but praising ideas on social media and taking power are very different levels of involvement. Even the successes of Communism or Anarchism don’t seem to have ever been that successful on a large scale or long term. I need something that is going to work in the near term, and if you have no idea, you shouldn’t be afraid to say so. Being disingenuous isn’t doing anyone any good. I want to be hopeful for the future too, but lies and pipe dreams aren’t going to achieve it. It’s not foolish to want those things, but without a roadmap to get there, it’s not going to just happen.
Supposedly the reasoning is that whatever you do that is less than total overthrow of the entire system is not good enough. So strikes are “not good enough”. This ofc ignores how totally overthrowing the government is also not good enough - see e.g. how Putin is managing “communist” Russia, or Whinnie the Pooh bear is managing “communist” China. Communism has never been managed to be implemented successfully irl. Yet somehow the tankies kNoW bEtTeR than literally everyone else world-wide about how things should be done? (Or else they are, however unwittingly, part of the disinformation campaign designed to further advance the Russian and/or Chinese agendas? indeed it is eery how both the Alt-Right and Alt-Left messages point to overthrowing the USA and UK and other governments, almost like that’s the real goal all along, and whatever means to achieve that are simply convenient tools to use?)
Despite the lack of success of communism irl, people still advocate for murdering CEOs, as if that would somehow solve… anything? For one thing it’s the system that is broken, and for another, the current level of technology is very much not on the side of isolated lone wolves who want to overthrow things. Moreover, the people I see espousing such ideas can’t even seem to articulate a cohesive argument, much less a convincing one, i.e. they are full of shit and their ideas don’t hold weight, and just bc they make the claim that they should have total freedom to speak their minds (which is ironic, considering how little “freedom” places such as Lemmy.ml offers its userbase), does not make it so. TLDR: liars often lie, perhaps first and most notably to themselves.
And even if they were going to actually do something - what makes it okay to discuss such a thing on the clear open web? On an instance that isn’t theirs? And in a community that they don’t bother to put in effort to moderate? And given how very often done from mere hours to days old accounts, even so much as contribute to at all? Like people were putting down Lemmy.World admins and mods for placing a brief (~24 hour iirc) hiatus on discussion of the very controversial and charged topic of jury nullification, which they (rightly imho) worried could have actual legal repercussions for instances in the USA. I mean, if you want to make your own instance, or your own community, then go ahead, but otherwise what right does someone have to complain about how some other admin/mod decides to do their business? Modding is a hard job, and people take it far too much for granted how much EFFORT is put into such by so many people across the Fediverse.
When people refuse to acknowledge the latter, that’s when I know that they are not clear thinking people: totally ignoring the long- or even short-term ramifications of an action (like, what if the current mod were to be forcibly removed: what comes next, when so few are willing to do the task in the first place?!) is merely one sign among many that everything else that they say is similarly likely to be totally false.
Which doesn’t make them subhuman or whatever, but does, to me, mean that they should not be in charge. So don’t let them sway you, if they lack any convincing evidence to back up even the smallest portion of whatever it is that they are trying to say. Not everyone is equally likely to be correct on the Fediverse. Not even if similar things are said from one hundred accounts. What makes something correct vs. not lies in its agreement with actual reality, period.
I’ve been thinking lately how any revolution would even be possible. I grew up in the 80s with things like Red Dawn, but nowadays we have satellites, thermal imaging, photo recognition, license plate scanning, gps tagged personal communication devices, and every doorbell is part of a photographic spy network. The Wolverines wouldn’t last a weekend.
Again, I don’t want to crap on anyone’s ideas necessarily, I just don’t find too much of it useful to me outside of some unique case studies and philosophy. Which is fine is we’re intending to talk about that. But I’d rather the political subs be about what candidates we do like, what bills we can support, etc. Yes, we have deep institutional problems, like any country, but tell me what we can achieve. We’re all fallible people, and we’re not going to get some messiah candidate to just appear. All politics is compromise. I don’t need to love my dear leader, but I want to see them do more good than harm, which I feel is something that is still achievable.
Well, I thank you for your pretty rational to me opinions, but I don’t want to go on here forever. The initial post was about not alienating more people than necessary, and I try to limit my political preaching to stuff about the environment. Thank you for the conversation though. I’ve enjoyed it, and your post history is pretty calm and regular talk, so you seem like a legit decent person. I’m glad you are here.
while the ones we are talking about here are Alt-Left, but is there all that much difference, really?
Yes
I often want go simply reply “dumb fuck!!” without explaining myself, but I make a conscious effort to save the post and reply in a more constructive way since this isn’t Twitter or whatever.
Though, wouldn’t it be really funny if you opened up a painfully stupid post and the only comment read “dumb fuck!!”
There are definitely threads I’ve seen where that would have been the only necessary response! 😂
I tend to just block those people.
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