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.
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.
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.
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.
The funny thing about Lemmy liberals is they’ll agree with just about everything anti-capitalist until you actually call it anti-capitalism.
Agreed, not censoring is the right call, I was just curious why that community specifically.