Fediverse

Right wingers will be like, "Well he's racist but we agree on taxes and the gays so he's all right with me."

Left wingers will be like, "We disagree on one of the 100 most important issues to me, therefore you are my enemy!"

I’m kind of surprised to not see this answer, so I’ll throw it in: it seems to me that there are a lot of people from various countries who have built-in language for politics that they believe is shared across the world - but it isn’t.

As a dumb American, I’ve always been a liberal because that was the inclusive, progressive, luxury-gay-space-communism option as opposed to the conservative, regressive, racist, ignorant violent option. People from other countries don’t seem to appreciate that at all, because their “liberal” is what we’d call neoliberal or corporate Democrat, and they apparently don’t have a FPTP / Slaver’s College fix on their elections and they just don’t grok the two party thing.

As you can imagine on here there’s a lot of hate from both conservatives and leftists for “liberals”. I think that’s ridiculous but it’s usually easier to try and adopt their definitions than to explain why the other 379,999,999 of us don’t use it that way. (Well - 350M, say. Parts of the PNW use it that way too.). It’s just kind of exhausting in threads about American politics.

If someone calls me a “liberal” (or libtard, libcuck, etc) I naturally assume they’re racist, fascist, AM radio fuckwits. But then they want to jump into some world where H4A, UBI, No Oil is what they’re all about and once again I’m like - well, yeah we agree, again. So.

(Usually the retort is, “well then why are you a liberal?!” Which. Goes back to the exhausting thing.)

I'm not a fan of the infighting either. It's a very online kind of tribalism. I'm pretty active in anarchist organizing where I live and routinely have people from all sorts of tendencies showing up to help out without it devolving into a struggle session over factional infighting from a hundred years ago.

Just from the time I've spent here it seems like it's specifically the people occupying the centrist liberal positions who are most invested in fostering a culture of leftist infighting

There's a lot of people out there whose goal is to feel morally superior, rather than change the world in any way.
They tend to congregate at the extremes both left and right. Anywhere when they can loudly judge and exclude others.

I'd like to share my offline perspective here. All online spaces are kind of heightened versions of the discourse, Lemmy less so than other places but it's still there.

In the real world leftists are generally kind and empathetic people who genuinely want to do good. It's nice when you find another leftist, I have friends who are various flavours of anarchist and socialist and even some real life, genuine, aging commune hippies now living in town. There is no animosity and we would basically all agree on local direct action or local politics. In my experience even most liberals are just naive rather than genuinely holding counterproductive political beliefs.

It can feel very lonely but you're not alone.

Libs and tankies are both right-wingers masquerading as left. So they're constantly locking horns over whose empire is better, whose glorious leader is more righteous, whose genocide (ukr/pal) is more the fault of the victims, etc. It's as simple as this:

Hey, I don't speak for anyone here, but this isn't a problem. Decentralization is a means to an end, not a desirable state in and of itself. Federated networks being separate from each other is fine. I feel this has been a critical misunderstanding among advocates of open source social media.

Honestly, best experiences I have had on ActivityPub were replacements for a group chat of 40-200 persons, not an attempted replacement for Twitter. (Also crucially not on a Mastodon fork but stuff like Akkoma.)

Since this app is clearly for some people a replacement for the general mechanics of websites like Stack Overflow, HN, and Reddit, and for other people meant to be a direct fork of specific Reddit communities, it makes sense to me that the networks would diverge completely, though it seems it hasn't happened yet.

What really kept me from using Lemmy is the poor integration with Mastodon. It's not a UI thing. Mbin and Kbin were a step in the wrong direction by furthrt splitting the UI between two types of posts that are the same under the hood

Congratulations on noticing the human tendency to form tribes.

It would be best to focus on policies and ideas rather than ideological alignement. The moment someone says "thats socialist!" "That's right wing!" Is the moment where no meaningful action is taken, where discussion ends since you suddenly decide that your alignment is irreconcilable and makes no outcome possible.

Tribalism. Humankind haven't progress beyond the instincts of having in-groups and out-groups.

Until that happens, there will be discrimination. People would see things in black and white instead of understanding there are shades of gray between.

Reminds me of 'Why I hate being left' https://youtu.be/O-qcXpapsoY

Leftists hate every other flavour of leftist that doesn't align 100% with their flavour of leftist. Its the same reason the centre is moving right. As the right is unironically more accepting and ideologically diverse.