Why is the solarpunk memes community on this instance filled with such massively anti-left folks?

  • Schmoo@slrpnk.net
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    3 months ago

    The anti-left sentiment is coming primarily from outside slrpnk. Solarpunk memes is the most popular community on the instance, giving it broad reach, and lemmy is broadly liberal with a few leftist sanctuaries (the most extreme of which are defederated from the liberal instances).

    The way I see it, we have a couple options. Either we can go the way of lemmy.ml or hexbear and heavily censor liberals, creating constant inter-instance drama and likely ending up defederated, or we can accept that our most popular communities will be full of liberals in the comments and treat them as a form of outreach.

    I prefer the second option. For one, even though the comments are full of liberals, the posts themselves are overwhelmingly leftist, which means a lot of liberals are being exposed to leftist views. They will reject it most of the time - as most people do when confronted with views that conflict with their own - but sometimes something might stick, and that’s a good thing. Also we have our smaller and more niche communities to hang out in if you want to avoid the liberals.

    • poVoq@slrpnk.net
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      3 months ago

      We as admins obviously have some red lines, but overall as @[email protected] has already commented in this thread it is up to the community moderators to steer the individual community’s direction.

      Overall I agree with the outreach notion, but I did notice an increase in relatively low effort liberal rage-bait “memes” being posted in our /c/memes community with predictable results in the comments (including right-wing trolling to fan the flames). I don’t think those specific memes are particularly effective as outreach tools, so it would be probably beneficial to do a bit more early moderation on that part.

    • DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
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      3 months ago

      The funny thing about Lemmy liberals is they’ll agree with just about everything anti-capitalist until you actually call it anti-capitalism.