Asklemmy

I had a much better experience with Reddit than a lot of people express. Of course that all changed that year and half ago. But my point is that I was deep into a world of intellectualism on Reddit that I have not found since it was wrecked. I have found Lemmy to be an infant version of that.

It is hard to find communities like I had, if there is any activity in my interests at all. I have not found a news feed as quick as the ones I followed on Reddit if any feed at all. Information sourcing and original content almost never happen. The politics are highly tribal and intellectual here. The science barely exists. The hobbies and special interests have little to no activity. I only have the app on my phone to look for a quick read.

No single instance has very "broad" POVs, however some instances are federated more broadly and thus get more points of view. To that end, Lemm.ee and Lemmy.ml are much more diverse than Lemmy.world, which is defederated from the major instances with large populations of Marxists.

Hexbear and Grad tend to have a lot of Marxist (and Anarchist, in the case of Hexbear) perspectives you aren't really seeing much of on Lemmy.world, which is very "US Democrat Liberal."

You aren't going to find anywhere where the virtue of being "different" is worthy of celebration when it comes to POVs, and I think that's a bit of a lost cause. I don't see much value in entertaining the opinions of fascists, as an example.

You might be better off looking for a community where the moderation optimizes for that kind of discussion (ex. Removing low effort comments, requiring citations, academic oriented, etc). It's harder to find an entire instance that matches those points, but there should be a few communities like that

Then you can use the subscribed feed only, or block the communities you don't like

A better question is which instances have dominant points of view that actually align with the material reality we inhabit. Difference of opinion is only valuable when the opinion is grounded in factual understanding of the real world. It's valuable to have different views and interpretation of the facts, but if a view is divorced from reality then it's just noise.

Register and account on another instance that passes the litmus test of federation with .ml and hexbear. Block .world on that new account. Don't block all those instances .world told you to blindly hate.

Imagine your issue with .world being that it's too left-wing

If by "diverse" you mean "has western conservatives", then considering how the entire concept of the fediverse is progressive, you're not going to find many of them here. On Reddit, there's r/AskPolitics which overall leans liberal and is US centric but is more open to discussion than other subreddits. There's some other debate subreddits as well which you might be interested in. They're helpful for developing political views, but after that hearing the same BS from people who have fundamentally different values gets tiring and people leave so that's why there aren't many of those spaces.

If you're open to other viewpoints that are opposed to both Republican and Democrat, leftist instances like lemmy.ml, Hexbear, Lemmygrad, and dbzer0 have that, and they can have very different stances on other issues as well (i.e. Lemmygrad vs dbzer0). They can still be echo-chambery (which is hard to avoid) but they also tend to have more users that are interested in intellectual debate.

As far as what instance actually has the most diverse points of view, I'd say lemm.ee which federates with basically everybody and I've seen users there from all over the political spectrum. However, there's isn't much in terms of political discussion there compared to other instances.

Perhaps surprisingly when it comes to breaking the echo chamber and having diverse political points of view and approaches (on subjects like identity politics, intersectionality, geo politics, organization building, strategy...etc) I'd say even ML circles have a lot more of that than just vaguely leftist safe liberal stances (at the very least they might have novel ideas and no orange man bad meme).

If you want more diversity of opinions you can expand in different directions, but I hardly see what good would be a place that has both fascists and anti-fascists for example and most of us are tired of picking internet fights. I suppose as long as you're aware of which kind of discussion you've more tolerance for you're good, but whether it's tolerance for the occasional black crime rate statistic or an esoteric graph of the falling rate of profit, you're not likely to find a space that has both.

In general I'd go with Cowbee's recommendations though (for something that's still obviously fairly leftwing)

db0 is federated with world hexbear beehaw ml and many others.

What kind of diversity of thought are you looking for?

Could you give an example?

Is there an intellectually honest point of view that Donald Trump isn’t a fascist?

I think you are going to have a hard time finding a place to talk with a group that overall deals in bad faith arguments and hate speech. They also tend to silo themselves off to their own platforms over concerns that their hate speech gets them moderated (because Free Speech != does not mean speech without consequences or needs to be tolerated by everyone).

If you really want to see the MAGA "point of view" you are probably better off going to them on Truth Social, Gab, 4chan, The_Donald, etc.

Do people do good, spirited debates anymore? Most of what I see would be more akin to wrestling a pig.

No.

Your best bet is to be in a lot of instances. My experiences so far is that basically any singular instance has its bias', and while some unapologetically ban users for disagreeing with them, the ones that don't still down vote for disagreeing with them.

While one of these forms of censorship is worse than the other, it's all censorship, and the only way to see a variety of views is to stay in the varying instances.