As Goat has said, this platform (Lemmy) is comprised of instances, some, like Lemmy.world, are general instances, and some have a specific theme or type of content they cater to. There's one for furry porn, one for regular porn, for example, and one for utterly insufferable Internet communists who make a point of behaving badly in other communities.
I wanna push back on this. The whole point of federation is that people from different communities interact, but when an active community like hexbear predictably has a ton of people leave a comment on a post that reaches their /all page it gets called "brigading" when it's literally just people using the most basic feature of the website.
Sorry, but no. I've seen how they engage with other instances, their strategy is to dogpile on anyone who dares disagree with them, flood the thread with insults and shitty images, and generally behave like poo flinging monkeys. They don't debate, they don't actually make a cohesive argument for their beliefs, their entire approach is to use overwhelming force to drown out opposing voices.
Really it's just like subreddits, but with an additional level added on. So each instance has its own culture and rules, and then their own communities within them that may or may not overlap with communities on other instances.
So you might think you're commenting on a post from lemmy.world/c/politics, which is pretty liberal and mainstream for an American forum, but it's actually hexbear.net/c/politics, which is quite far left and has very active users, who respond to your comment completely differently.
the thing about hexbear isn't just that they're far left, but that they are violently auth-left, and live in a huge echo-chamber, as most instances defederated from them. plenty of far left people are actually very grounded and human compared to them, see slrpnk.net and the an-soc instances. while they have strong opinions, they won't immediately wish death upon you if your views clash
The political compass is a terrible metric for tracking political currents. Disagree with Hexbear for how aggressively they post, sure, but drop that designation.
yeah, I definitely agree there, not to mention that "authoritarian left" is self contradicting to begin with. It's a pretty direct two-word description though, I find, and better than just calling them "tankies" which is even more vague
Let me rephrase, is there anywhere that isn’t a circlejerk in either direction? I came here hoping it would be like Reddit pre 2016 where most of the main subs would at least have discussion and debate in the comments and not just a bunch of people blindly agreeing with each other.