this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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Even though most of the comments here point out the obvious that phones are a risk, this kind of journalism is still important for spreading awareness and documentation of illegal surveillance for the record
Yeah lemmy is mostly a left echo chamber, which is generally a net positive. But someone like my cousin who still gets their news from Facebook but might want to protest now they are thinking about their views would benefit from this journalism
Eh, it's a center-left chamber at best. As evidenced by the extreme reaction to the far-left echo chambers.
By "far-left" you mean the pro-Russia and pro-China segment of this place? They seem more like government mouthpieces than people who actually support leftist policies (which don't represent the policies of the Russian or Chinese government.
This place is also full of Blue MAGA liberals which I'd classify as right-wing at this point, so it seems there's a whole spectrum of beliefs represented here.
also calling people blue maga is very disengenious, they arnt right wingers so please dont associate with them.
They certainly are right-wingers when the support candidates and policies that are wholly right wing. I don't care if they think they're leftists just because they're voting Democrat. They're just deluding themselves. This is the origin of the adage "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." The Democrats haven't represented the left in decades and now they've moved so far right that they're aiding in genocide, fucking the working class, and prancing around the campaign trail with Dick Cheney
Disagree, it's pretty far left. Reddit was center-left, this is where those too far left for Reddit came as it shifted a little to the right with the top-down reaction to the API change.
You refer to .ml, but that's not really left, it's a tankie instance, which is closer to fascism than socialism. I see far more people on Lemmy idolizing communism/socialism than any other extreme ideology.
I left because of the api changes and the excessive censorship (rip r/watchpeopledie my beloved) and it's general hatred towards ita mobile website
You're oversimplifying (and so was I, to be totally fair). The Reddit exodus has lots of reasons. I think it has more to do with one's thoughts on corporatization and technocultural knowledge which does correlate with left-leaning politics. I'm sure there are many who are just sick of platforms giving Trumpists tacit approval (I think this is the primary driver for people leaving twitter) but that Venn diagram is not a perfect circle.
.ml has tankies, and there's plenty of fair criticism to direct at Dessalines and the mod team for generally cultivating a culture of knee-jerk anti-Western thought (and the inverse, more importantly) but it's not "closer to fascism" because it leans authoritarian and drapes itself in USSR/CCP aesthetic. But it's mostly a FOSS instance with well-deserved bashing of US imperialism and state-sponsored terrorism.
Tankies are pretty close to fascism, and tend to support regimes like in Russia the same as regimes in China. For them, the motivation doesn't seem as motivated by economics as itvi government structure, since modern Russia is very far from socialist ideals. Basically, anything that goes against US interests is the priority, not economics as it would for your average socialist.
I think you're losing some nuance but yeah "anything that goes against US interests is the priority" is a real problem in some leftist spaces (I was banned from /r/latestagecommunism for suggesting that maybe the things we hear about North Korea aren't just Western lies to discredit a true Communist state.) Of the "big three" I see the most of that on lemmygrad so I don't bother.
But there's a scale of uncritical support and I think people use "tankie" a little too broadly to dismiss people rather than consider the different facets of belief. Online discourse sucks.
I just hate their app and refuse to use it
Oh it's a terrible app, just the worst.
Democratic market socialism is a perfectly moderate ideology (too moderate, because often it lets the market win over and the democracy decay). You can also consider weekends, paid leave, women's vote, public education, healthcare, public media and social security as socialist policies. It is one of the main political currents founding the EU and in South America. Only in the US is it used to describe radicals or as an insult.
I'm even reluctant to point this out to magats now, because they never get the point and may even get it in their head that these are the things to destroy wherever they exist, just because they're socialist in origin.
Sure, democratic socialism is center left, I'm talking about actual socialism, which gets promoted here quite a bit. Reddit was mostly dem socs and welfare state proponents, Lemmy takes it a bit further.
Yes, but that is no reason to disparage socialism itself. In authoritarian socialism, it is the authoritarian part that sucks.
Democratic socialism isn't socialism though, it's capitalism with lots of government services.
The authoritarian part is pretty much baked in to "real" socialism since you need something to control the means of production until society is ready, and that hasn't yet happened. Yes, there are other theorized structures, but they're unproven.
Tankies (i.e. many of those on .ml) are into the authoritarian part, whereas people here are more into democratic socialism, which is another thing entirely.
Yes, indeed, socialism is an intellectual offshoot of capitalism/liberalism/enlightenment (not neoliberalism, of course) that emerged as a reaction to the industrial revolution (and the French revolution, or you could go as far back as the English civil war, with the levellers) as a reaction to the wealth inequality it creates and it predates Marxism, but communism coopted the term and made it seem exclusively authoritarian (because that was supposedly the only way to beat capital).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism#Etymology
It depends on where you draw the line for "the center." I'd agree it's leftist for America, but it's center-left on a global scale. You'll usually get some push back if you promote true leftist politics. Usually more agreement than dissent, but still some.
Sure, the US does skew right. I do think Lemmy is pretty far left even compared to areas like Europe that are further left from the US. It's kind of hard to gauge whether people are serious about things like "guillotine the rich" (or Luigi references) or exaggerating, but you don't see that type of talk on popular subreddits (even before the crackdown), at least I didn't, and coming to Lemmy was a bit of a shift left from what I already saw as "center left."
I am a bit left of center in the US and pretty centrist on a global scale, and I lean fairly libertarian. I'm left of most libertarian candidates in the US, supporting things like UBI as an alternative to welfare programs. So I think I have a decent perspective on what's left and right.
I started at your position a long time ago, when I was a teenager. I realized libertarians are full of shit, and eventually discovered a better descriptor of my beliefs was anarchist (in particular, social anarchist). I think the government shouldn't be telling people how to live or what they can or can't do. It should be there to protect people (emphasis; not corporations).
Libertarians (in the US at least) are really just anarcho-capitalists. They want freedom for businesses, but usually at the expense of freedom for people. They don't want protection for people from exploitation. They want businesses with enough money to be able to exert their authority as far as possible, to the extent of blocking competition and effectively creating slaves. (They'll argue they don't agree with slavery, but what's the difference between your employer owning your ability to live and slavery?)
the so-called left wing one are usually the ones we block , but they seem more like right wingers.
Wat
If this were a lefty echo chamber people wouldn't hate .ml but they do.
Idolizing authoritarian governments isn't "left" no matter how much they might think it is.
Anarchism isn't the only way to be a leftist.
There's an awful lot of space between authoritarianism and anarchism.
There sure is, including "vanguardism" which was what many conflate with totalitarianism because of how the Cold War shook out. Really, it was the success of anti-Communist propaganda in the Red Scares that has colored so much of our assumptions and talking points as well as the unbridled might of the American military to suppress and punish any nation that tried something other than subservience.
In what way would you classify the Chinese or Russian governments that these tankies support "communist?" That's like believing that Nazis were a socialist party simply because that word is in the name.
Well that's easy, I don't. Looking at the actions of Putin or Xi Jinping and saying "this is a communist state that I fully endorse" doesn't make sense to me. But I think there's a lot of people that look at those countries through the historical lens and resonate with the aspirations and ideals of Marx and Lenin and other political thinkers of the era and get wrapped up in the association. And America has made it really easy to bash America, that tends to land you among modern and historical rivals.
You ignore 50% of the political compass here - authoritarianism sucks just as much as fascism or unbridled capitalism.
At the extreme, sure. Authority/Anarchy isn't a binary selection. (Fascism is an authoritarian position, specifically it's a right-nationalist movement centered on cultural identity)
And that is exactly the situation in Russia: it's an
It's pretty late, so i don't repeat the exercise for China or bring up more examples - i'm pretty sure that if you try to counter my points someone else will give you more examples.
At no point in here have I said that Russia isn't a fascist state. It checks all the boxes: violent, authoritarian, nationalist, suppressing minorities and marginalized groups, single party, lots of corruption. You're confusing my Communist sympathies with uncritical support for the modern regime dressed in red.
If .ml were a lefty echo chamber people wouldn't hate hexbear, but they do.
Hexbear is specifically the shitpost refuge of displaced terminally-online /r/chapotraphouse diaspora and it's hard to parse the layers of irony and in-joke and I'm not invested enough in that community to try and fairly represent it here. I'm not surprised that people have an aversion to it but the amount of space it takes up in some people's head here is bonkers. The goals and culture are very different than .ml.