It definitely seems to lean left, from my (American) view. That might be because most of the western world would classify as left by my (American) standards?
There have been some right-wing and far-right instances, but they seem to get de-federated by the majority.
"Left" and "right" tend to decoher once you move outside a particular political space into another (e.g. one country to another). The UK right wing party introduced gay marriage, but even the most left wing part of the country (Scotland) isn't particularly progressive (e.g. majority disapproval of allowing gender self identification to 16).
Similarly, trying to judge the UK on racial issues by US standards gets quite confusing. The common British attitude towards Romani would make even the confederate flag wavers of Texas call them racists.
On the other hand, there's full support for plenty of state intervention and state support, e.g. pretty much no one says they want to abolish the NHS.
> Similarly, trying to judge the UK on racial issues by US standards gets quite confusing. The common British attitude towards Romani would make even the confederate flag wavers of Texas call them racists.
Not directly related to Romani treatment in Britain (not familiar enough with that to judge), but sometimes I wonder if the english language needs better words to distinguish between race based bigotry and culture based bigotry.
eg often I notice for a person there will be a difference in how they treat/view "acclimatised" descendants of immigrants vs new immigrants due to being ostensibly the same race but different culturally. Of course racists will still have bigotry for both groups.
> sometimes I wonder if the english language needs better words
Words like this are not bad by coincidence, they're bad because they're incredibly politically important words and thus have their meanings and connotations fought over intensely.
It doesn't matter what new word or words you try and put in place, if they relate to things people have different strong feelings on then the meanings will become messy over time.
Lavengro: The Scholar, the Gypsy, the Priest (1851) is a work by George Borrow, falling somewhere between the genres of memoir and novel, which has long been considered a classic of 19th-century English literature.
Theodore Watts, in an introduction to the 1893 edition, declared that "There are passages in Lavengro which are unsurpassed in the prose literature of England".[9] This edition started a run of reprints which produced one or more almost every year for 60 years. Lavengro was included in the Oxford University Press World's Classics series in 1904, and in Everyman's Library in 1906.[10]
it's awful. it's like a single reddit. the instances are atomic, so you get world-moderators, who are all "tankies" in lemmy own parlance (left, communist, heavily sided with russia as ussr continuity)
If you use lemmy.ml, sure. Or if you don't curate a frontpage of your own topics, sure. But I joined through some unaligned Scandinavian instance, found topics I like, and stay away from the /r/all equivalent, and it's just as tolerable as Reddit, if less populous.
I joined a instance focused on Android and follow another "mainstream" sub, and don't see that. There are some instances that are very "tankie" learning though... I avoid them, like I avoid any far right/left subs on reddit.
Good, it leans left, but not so far left that it’s just LGBTQ/feminist spam. It doesn’t have a bunch of right wing trolls so far. It’s like the early days of Reddit.
> Good, it leans left, but not so far left that it’s just LGBTQ/feminist spam.
It's not quite _spam_ but I think it's fair to say it's much more left-leaning than mainstream Reddit.
Some of the biggest communities, even non-political ones, are on instances such as Blåhaj (LGBTQ-oriented), Lemmy.ML (Marxist-oriented), Hexbear (Marxists on meth).
Short of subscribing to a defederated instance, you need to go out of your way to avoid left-wing content on Lemmy. Whereas on Reddit you could get rid of most of it by unsubscribing from the top 100 subreddits - which is something you wanted to do anyway for the sake of quality, even if you were the world's biggest leftist.
There's a really good quip here about how leftwingers are naturally the most likely candidates to give away free web forums instead of trying to run web forum businesses, but I'm keeping it subscribers-only.
That's correct. When people speak of the early days of Reddit it seems like they are talking about whatever time long ago they initially joined.
I'm always hesitant to make accounts on new sites, so I thought I had waited a long time to join officially, but I ended up being in the first 500 accounts! From the earliest days (the del.icio.us to Reddit influx) it was a very libertarian place. Sometimes annoyingly so.
Reddit has shifted so many times over the nearly 2 decades, but most who stay for a long time have realized that it's great for pocket communities in smaller subreddits, as long as they last and aren't co-opted. The bots are the worst part at the moment.
I remember in the early days of reddit there was a guy who would post links to his Austrian economics / Murray Rothbard blog every day, and they would end up on the front page because they had like 50 upvotes.
It was a pretty left leaning libertarian though. As soon as those racist papers he authored came out he quickly fell off of Reddit’s radar. Not to mention, he co-opted at lot of the left’s iconography with his re”love”ution campaign.
There have been some right-wing and far-right instances, but they seem to get de-federated by the majority.
Hope that helps.