No Stupid Questions

1. Well, a lot of people jumped ship from other platforms because of politics. So they're gonna be here.

2. It's a time where politics are fucking with all of us, so it's topical.

3. reddit still exists and has a larger base, so if you want to talk about stardew valley, just by the nature of numbers that's where they're gonna gather.

4. There are a lot of "lurkers" here, not a lot of posters. Seriously, notice how often The Picard Maneuver, or Stamets keeps popping up.

God I hate to be the guy who says this especially because I am ABSOLUTELY being hypocritical right now, but you gotta be the change you want.

Block communities you don't want to see. Browse and look for communities that aren't currently hitting your front page and subscribe. Yesterday, I discovered one that was right up my alley that I hadn't seen after nearly two years on Lemmy.

We're all kind of living in hell because of our disfunctional system and fearful countrymen. So we're just kinda trying to cope together by commiserating.

• block all political comms
• block all political meme comms
• block all political news comms
• block posts with politicians names

After you do that, Lemmy is quite nice and easy to browse.

I don't want to be political, but the government decided that me existing should be illegal. So now me posting about fashion or makeup or whatever is automatically political now.

Because shit's really fucked up right now and needs to be fixed.

You're like one of those people in a world war, "Why's everyone so political*?*"

Bitch, politics affects everything. And everything's fucked up. Therefore, politics everywhere. Wanna have it not be everywhere? Fix it then. Don't complain that everybody's pissed off about everything and act like you're confused, you aren't that dumb. Nobody's that dumb.

Well there are a lot of factors, and there are plenty of Niche communities you could pay attention to more often, but the most overwhelmingly significant factor is that shits really fucking bad right now. Like yeah we all wish we could live in a in a time where politics was boring and not life-threatening but that's not how the world is at the moment. You just can't escape reality. But you have to physically ignore things to try to remove politics from your world. I don't even know how it's possible, everything is being touched right now by politics, everything.

Unfortunately the vast majority of us are not privileged enough to be able to ignore politics in our lives.

Lemmy suffers from the "alt-tech curse" in that since there is perfectly serviceable, normie friendly tech, for someone to come to the alternative you have to be not so normie.

Gab, Parler, Voat back in the day, Mastodon and Lemmy, bluesky, etc are all part of the same phenomenon of micro-exodi from established sites due to fitting poorly with existing moderation which, given the fact normies still use the sites, means we're always looking at extremists of some kind.

Whether it's the tankies on lemmy.ml, or the progs on bluesky, or the tradcons on parler and gab, it's always some group being told "if you don't like it here go make your own" and them doing it.

The problem is this makes these environments extremely off-putting to normies as every single motherfucker on each of these platforms has at least a Bachelor's degree in scaring the hoes.

The reality is, if you want normie content, you're gonna find it on platforms used by normies.

Lemmy is too niche to have karma farming bots reposting the same shit every hour, so cat videos etc are in short supply, and most of the people who do participate here have scary levels of politics brainrot.

It only is if you want it to be. Subscribe to what you like and that isn't your will see if you only view those things.

Use scaled as a sort occasionally to see other posts in your subscriptions. I switch back and forth.

At the same time: the world is crazy now. There is a lot of push to take away things like platforms like this. People are trying to push opinions and people are scared.

This is a time of political crisis. The US government is upending decades of alliances and economics. The right wing is globally on the rise, and that means people's lives are in danger. The environment is becoming more unpredictable and less supportive for humanity.

There's a lot of important political shit to talk about. If we were living in a boring utopia, there'd be less, probably.

Also, what do you even consider "political"? Some people will tell you that a story about a man and a woman getting married isn't political, but a story about two men getting married is. That's a really low quality analysis there.

The block button is your responsibility. Use it frequently and this place is great. I've blocked loads of communities and now the only problem with my page is when I run out of content and everything goes all German.

You privilege is showing.

Whenever someone claims to be “apolitical”, or wants something to “not be political”, is because they are looking at it from a position of privilege where the status quo doesn't hurt or challenges them. They also can't see the oppression, hurt or risk that said thing exerts on others, minorities, or social pariahs.

Non-political is a mythical creature. It exists as a safe haven to lure the insensitive into apathetic inaction. Nothing is apolitical because existing as a human being is itself political.

All I can say is be the change you want to see. Submit posts, maybe mod a community. I'm doing !gamedev, and it gets political sometimes, like any career field, but it is what it is.

Maybe you want a Marvel community, or whatever. Find your interest and dive in!

Life is political, and it leans left.

Because you're not filtering by your subscribed communities.

Everything is political

There's probably a correlation between people who are aware enough of reddit's practices and policies to want to switch to Lemmy and people who are engaged in or by political discussion.

Maybe it's just your subscriptions? I don't feel the same way. Just curate your list more actively and make sure to browse communities from global pool of instances.

Stick your head in the sand if you want to, but as a trans woman, I need to know when I’m gonna get imprisoned for existing, and never see my family again.

Sorry to make things political.

Maybe if some orange turd wasn't busy fucking up everything from board games to airplanes politics wouldn't come up so much.

Hard to have a conversation without it when there's a massive tariff on every single product related to work, hobbies, and even just living.

I’m not against some political stuff but there’s so many circlejerk opinion pieces that get posted. It’s just a bunch of people posting stuff that confirms their own beliefs, which is no better than what happens on the likes of Xitter. It’s just a different kind of echo chamber but people are okay with it because it’s left rather than right.

Because Lemmy's userbase was boosted by a lot of reddit banned people, and reddit bans people for political speech. I'd guess lemmys userbase doesnt represent a random sampling of the general population.

No offense, but if you are an American adult and don't understand why so many posts are political right now you probably need to be reading them. We are probably going through the most problematic power shift the world has seen in 100 years and if we The American People don't start fighting back substantially we are looking at losing most of our rights as free citizens.

It's that fucking serious.

Lemmy is mostly populated by intelligent people (include yourself if applicable) that fled reddit when the app crackdown began.

As such we talk and some of that talk covers the current situation in the world of politics.

If you don't want to see any there are plenty of subs you can use.

You can also do what I do which is block the orange turnips name so you don't see the posts.

Dude. Politics is huge right now because we're going through a tough time globally. It's a lot of people justifying cruelty and invasions.

These were the hot topics so that's what grew fastest. Remember that Lemmy is still kinda new.

I know that if I need an oura-/smart ring community I can either wait or I can start one. I'm not gonna start one as it'd be negligent of me.

What do you want to see? What do you not? Find or start what you want, and block what you do not.

It has never been much different on Reddit. Maybe you only notice this here because people here tend to swing more left.

I only see politics on the few explicitly political and news munis I've subbed.

Are you browsing by 'all'? If so, switch to 'subscribed' and it'll prolly fix 95% of it for you.