Until the rule is removed, any new posts about US politics will be removed.
Instead of complaining can someone who dislikes this decision please just create a community like “AskLemmyUS”, post a link here so people can find it and get on with it?
After today’s defederation of discuss.online with hexbear.net, and the post Could Discuss.online become the go-to USA instance?, I created the !askusa@discuss.online community (anyone with an established Discuss.Online account and reputation want to help mod it?). The instance admins don’t want such controversial material like USApolitics, but AskUSA as a nice, friendly community to have neat discussions in is perfectly compatible with the mission statement of my home instance!:-)
I modeled the community name after !AskUK@feddit.uk and made it a sister community, along with this one (any others that should be added?).
I like preference for self posts!
Proper discussion, not politics echo chamber staffed by dnc clowns
politics echo chamber
That better be talking about a lack of diverse left wing opinions, not just a lack of republicans
both… and more…
US political discourse is a pathetic Republican/Democrat circle jerk, then pika face when all we get are regime whore clowns swapping the office while quality of life deteriorates for bottom 80%
Republicans don’t have any political policy, so it’s not surprising that there’s noyhing to discuss.
Did not stop them from the spanking the “good guys” in these elections lol
Ha ha very funny I love when fundamental rights get eroded
That’s what I’ve told so many complaining people. If anyone wanted to they could make one and it would be filled with users in hours, just click create community. Hell tell the mods here to suggest people go there for those discussions, they’d probably link it in the sidebar. But someone has to do it. (And as a mod of a few other communities, someone else can take that one)
But that would be US ExCePtIoNaLiSm!
No, US exceptionalism is turning every single general purpose community into US politics.
For the 4% of Earth’s population that does indeed live in the US, there could be local communities.
It’s still weird to me that there is no US instance. LW and lemm.ee are hosted in Europe, SJW and lemmy.ca in Canada, lemmy.ml and hexbear use a European datacenter.
I mean there is midwest.social and dubvee, but we could have expected a large US instance to have emerged by now.
The closest is probably https://lemmy.today/, but only has 194 users per month.
As a lemmy.today user myself (though not American), it’s cozy in there!
But the numbers are surprisingly low. It’s an instance that is run without donations though, only on the good will of its creator (who refuses donations citing sufficient income to keep it as a hobby project), so I imagine having it big could potentially become a strain.
There used to be dmv.social, which iirc was in Washington DC? It got shut down due to the CSAM attacks, before the automated software, and iirc just frustration in general with how toxic people were being.
And I see a bunch more actually, at https://lemmy.fediverse.observer. 2 of the top 20 instances even are located in the USA. Lemmy.sdf.org with >500 MAUs, beehaw.org with ~400, StarTrek.website with ~200, lemmy.today, ttrpgnetwork, and discuss.online (where jgrim of SubLinks is an admin) are all recognizable. Ofc, the caveat being if I am reading that page correctly - or like perhaps some proxy was used, even a random one and this data could be all wrong who knows - but it at least looks this way?:-)
Lemmy.sdf.org had a lot of federation issues until recently. They are also very FOSS oriented rather than generic
I don’t even consider Beehaw a Lemmy instance anymore as they defederate LW and SJW
I should have probably said “generic US instance”, with communities like AskUSA, CasualUS, this kind of things
In looking into why they defederated, it seems due to the poor implementation of moderation tools and the insistence of the largest instances on unregulated signups, which tend to allow trolls to easily evade blocks? Though from Kbin.social, StarTrek.website, Discuss.Online, and now PieFed.social, I have been able to see Beehaw the entire time iirc.:-)
Speaking as one myself, I think Americans tend not to be so proud of our country, especially lately. The enormous exception is ofc conservatives, who don’t tend to come here.
Part of the reason might be the ginormous size of just thousands of miles separating coast to coast, and more besides to Alaska or Hawaii etc. And more than merely geography there are the cultural divides, between North vs. South, East vs. West, and Midwest, etc. Though none of those matter even half as much as rural vs. urban.
Liberals (urban) tend to feel part of a global community, while conservatives (rural) turn inwards and want to focus only on ourselves - at which point the liberals don’t feel comfortable in such a space, as e.g. X provides. So while there are very good reasons to be, feeling “proud to be an American”, especially on a day like today, seems ironically anti-American, if that makes any sense. But yeah, people definitely are going to want to bitch and moan about the election results - as we should - and ironically there too we will do so alongside our global compatriots, in a global community, and probably on an instance outside of the USA since as you said there isn’t a large major one that seems all that suitable:-).
What about Lemmy.today? You’d want to check with them first ofc. They don’t even have a blocklist at all though - not even the CSAM ones so I don’t know how they do that. At a guess it may cause them problems to send so much traffic.
Or perhaps one of the PieFed or Mbin instances? They federate community content the same as any Lemmy instance I thought. Oh but the moderation aspect might make that prohibitive.
It could be really good to have some of those, like AskUSA where people ask what US State they should move to, to get away from lack of abortion care within their own location:-(. Though ironically an educated European may provide better answers than a confident-sounding American spouting off nonsense, as usual!:-)
Though from Kbin.social, StarTrek.website, Discuss.Online, and now PieFed.social, I have been able to see Beehaw the entire time iirc.:-)
As you know, I’m not the biggest LW fan, but even I wouldn’t use an account defederated from LW, especially with SJW on top. You’re missing probably 80% of the active communities, and 15% of the remaining are on lemmy.ml
Part of the reason might be the ginormous size of just thousands of miles separating coast to coast, and more besides to Alaska or Hawaii etc.
Even with that, why is there no Californian or New York instance? Seems weird to me seen how populous and tech oriented those places are
It’s still weird to me that there is no US instance.
Damn good thing. We definitely don’t want one hosted in a fascist country.
Hey, we won’t be fascist for at least another month or two!? 🗓️
Yes, not until Jan. 20th (MLK Day, he’d be so proud!). But it’s not like someone’s gonna set up a big Lemmy server, then move it to a different country later.
How the fuck is Lemmy supposed to serve as an open alternative to corporate controlled social media when the mods ban discussing one of the most impactful events of the day? You should be begging people to talk about politics here. Unsubbed. EDIT: AND BLOCKED. If I wanted to hang out in a fascist community I’d join twitter.
By giving people the opportunity to host their own instances and create their own communities with rules they like. This however does not mean that everything should be allowed everywhere. Actually this means that everywhere you go people make their own rules and if you dont like them, go somewhere else or create your own community.
This however is the main problem of social media in general. It creates circles of like-minded people where it is really easy to reject “other” thoughts and accept “our” ideas without much questioning. This is less a problem for people who are trained in critical thinking, but might be dangerous for more unstable people.
I’m just saying that a mix of different views is always good to some degree. Whether/how this should be done on Lemmy is a different thing.
Absolutely. If this rule was a permanent rule I don’t think so many people would defend it. However from experience (reddit for example) I think many people know that US politics has the ability to claim and overrun just about every space on the “western” internet. This is not something that really creates value for many people especially those that don’t live in the US and I think this ruling is trying to prevent that.
It creates circles of like-minded people where it is really easy to reject “other” thoughts and accept “our” ideas without much questioning.
I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but there is an argument to be made that we should actually go back to smaller, more secluded forums on the internet that are less connected with outside views.
Very interesting, haven’t seen that Kurzgesagt yet, thanks for sharing 🤘🏻
Interesting, thanks
I generally agree with your points on not wanting to create echo chambers; however, another reason for temporarily banning the topic imo is not just to block people talking about it but also to protect people who are already hurting, grieving, and generally just trying to find some sort of escape at the moment. Creating a space that will guarantee a temporary escape is nice, I think.
Ridiculous copy/paste reply. You’re not making a good case for people leaving corporate media for Lemmy. You’re encouraging them to stay where they are.
What’s wrong about it though? The freedom lies in the ability to create your own community that is not regulated by one company/organisation owning the platform. You can go to the place where you agree with the rules and you don’t have to live under the rules of someone you don’t like.
They’re just butthurt that they’re not being allowed to spew their hot takes all over this community as a captive audience that isn’t interested.
Nobody was doing that here, though. Have you even seen this community? It’s super inactive to begin with.
What’s wrong is fracturing. Lemmy is not so massive that it can sustain niche communities for every little topic.
I wouldn’t consider US politics a small topic, especially on Lemmy
It’s not a small topic, it’s a small community to set up all these tiny communities.
Community is what we called subs on the other site.
How are political communities tiny when they are 2 of the 6 most active communities on Lemmy?
To be honest, the issue is mostly about !politics@lemmy.world banning self posts (and thus people having to find alternatives such as !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world ) rather than the mods of !asklemmy@lemmy.world
Not every sub has to revolve around US elections all day/weeks/months long. That has nothing to do with corporate media.
If some other country had a historic election, I would HOPE to see open dialog spread in places like this for people to express themselves. Why ban an internationally relevant discussion when people have the choice to be members of the community. How about - if you don’t like it, you can leave.
But there are places for the discussion to be made. Lemmy as a whole did not ban the elections discussion, just this one specific sub. In fact, you’ll see basically every single sub of Lemmy discussing it.
This is a temporary rule for 1 single community.
How about - if you don’t like it, you can leave.
The irony in this sentence…
