Ask Lemmy

My aside:

In every community I see this. There are always folks trying to narrow the community to some cut and dry descriptors—which for them are always obvious.

Sometimes the jab is perhaps intended as a joke. But to my reading it's always a trope, namely the tired fallacy of taking a part as the whole.

Either way, it's myopic. In any internet community, we're always bound to narrowly see what's happening. Because:

• We can only see the posters, never the lurkers—which far exceed the former;
• Posters, by virtue of taking the time to post, are most often than not highly opinionated;
• Our reading is always selective. We're either misguided by the way the comments are sorted, by our mood at the moment, by chance, or simply because we're really bad at reading;
• Our reading is always biased. Either by our mood, our current situation in life, our upbringing, our milieu, whatever;
• the list goes on and on and on.

This results in a very reductive view that, although very teasing because very personal and idiosyncratic, is ultimately an exercise in futility. To those already biased, it simply supplies them with fodder to confirm what they already believed.

From afar, it's just noise. Any view on what the community is is but a poor reflection of what the community ultimately is.