No Stupid Questions

The Fediverse is home to a lot of young, tech-minded people distrustful of major corporations. The younger generations are more likely to come out as transgender due to greater awareness and acceptance of gender identity and dysphoria, and a decentralised, open platform is naturally going to appeal to communists, syndicalists and other left-wingers who don't want some billionaire buying the next website they get comfortable on. And funnily enough, there are a surprising number of trans people in the tech sector, to the point where trans-flag socks have become a meme among programmers.

Trans people and communists are nearly half of software dev. The other half are furries.

it's amazing what you see when algorithms aren't deciding it for you.

The issue I have with this is that publicly expressing their love for others is an extremely natural and normal thing to do. Talking openly about your opposite-gender spouse, kissing or holding hands with your partner, going out for a nice date - whatever. These are all totally normal things which people won't blink at when a heterosexual couple is doing it, yet LGBT people can still be discriminated against for these behaviours. That's not even getting into trans or gender-non-conforming people, who can be discriminated against simply for existing and presenting the way they do.

I don't just want to ensure that LGBT people are free from explicit legislative discrimination. I want them to be free from social discrimination as well. Social consequences for being publicly gay are not acceptable, even if people aren't in favour of more open forms of discrimination.

I find myself to be a stereotypical Lemmy user. I'm trans, (anarcho-) communist, a programmer and Linux engineer.

I'm older, I transitioned (ugh I hate that word) about 2 decades ago. I got into computers consciously and very intentionally. I knew I'd need to support myself soon and spent a good amount of time thinking what industries or companies might be willing to hire someone like me (this was even before trans people had employment rights in California!). I chose computers because I felt like it was an industry where someone might hire me, I could make enough to survive and pay for surgery, and because it seemed one where my co-workers would be less likely to beat me up or kill me.

When it comes to communism, I have a hunch that being trans forces you to think about society and why you are not accepted, who is causing your troubles and why. It seems apparent why someone so low on the social acceptance ladder as a trans person would be repelled by exploitation based zero-sum systems and attracted to systems that would allow them to survive and thrive.

Linux seemed just fundamentally awesome to me. You mean people could just choose to get together, coordinate, and build one of the most complex things to exist on the planet and give it away for free? Sign me up! I think Lemmy and the Fediverse are attractive for similar reasons.

Because the Lemmy software was developed by communist-leaning developers and they have, prior to the reddit exodus, had the biggest communities. As for the transgender related content, the transgender community was one of the largest to leave reddit for Lemmy.

Because the people that flock to these platforms first are usually technically adept nerds and free thinkers.

That'll be partly down to the communist and transgender coders who helped lay the foundations for this place.

There aren’t nearly as many right wingers and fascists as social media makes you believe. Speaking as a Mastodon instance admin, every single time we’ve had huge waves of bot and/or troll signups they’ve been very clearly right wing accounts (almost all had similar bios) that almost immediately started interacting with and boosting each other as well as harassing trans and queer people.

The thing about the fediverse is that it can’t be manipulated the way centralized social media can. So what happens is that it gets handled very quickly. They get banned and their instances get defederated so all they can do is shout into the void. They’re not, nor have they ever been, the majority by any stretch of the imagination, and most people have absolutely no desire to hear what they have to say at all.

On top of that, a huge number of them are grifters, and they won’t get any engagement here. They can’t get the kind of viral outrage they need because most people aren’t even seeing their posts.

Why is there such a large amount of Nazi, fascist, conservative, Republican, and bootlicking related posts on other platforms compared to the Fediverse?

in a word, intersectionality. you're getting people who were already looking for an excuse to ditch reddit and twitter, and of that group, you're selecting the ones with the most tech literacy. That tends to overlap people with progressive politics.

The more transgender related posts are mostly because 196 a very large queer and especially trans friendly subreddit closed permanently and migrated wholesale to a instance called blahajzone. If you look at r/place right now you can tell the absence of 196 by the fact there are very few queer symbols on r/place compared to last year where 196 and associated subs had coordinated artworks and defense campaigns for their flags. I'm pretty sure last time they managed to take over the American flag and force it to move to another spot on the canvas. Now there are two small flags and nothing else.

People that are naturally drawn to fediverse tend to be:

• self-hosting enthusiasts excited to run their own social media platforms, which are tend to be big supporters of FOSS
• left-leaning idealists who want to get away from big corps platforms
• pirates (arrr)

So it's not that surprising to see plenty of anti-capitalism and transgender stuff here if you consider this demographics.

We might be able to answer the question better if you named the "other platforms" you're referring to. It doesn't seem like an unusual amount compared to, for instance, how much communist/transgender content Reddit had back when Reddit wasn't as evil as it is now. (Who knows what Reddit's like now. I haven't been back since the two-day boycott over the API pricing.)

All that said, some of the communist content here is tankies. (That is, authoritarian communists who spout CCP or other authoritarian communist regimes' propaganda.) Some of the Lemmy instances (like latte.isnot.coffe and lemmy.ml) are run by tankies.

That said, a lot of the communist content here is grass-roots anarcho-communist advocacy by people like me who ideologically lean that way.

because the fediverse is a place where the admins choose to federate with whoever they want and get to choose what are the policies in their own instances. so you got a chance to stop the hatred and harrasment trans people are victim of on other social plateform where the company don't want to dive into "political" stuff

it's kind of a safe space online for trans and lgbt for that reason

My assumption is that the bots, shills, astroturfers and other corporate interests haven’t arrived in sufficient quantities yet.

It’s not that there’s more here, just the volume of noise out there is far greater and most of the content generated is for parties who gain no advantage from posing as part of either of those communities.

Gays are to Boomers as Trans is to Gen-X ers. I've been wondering what the marginalized group Millennials are going to have trouble with. My current guess is Poly, but that is just a guess at this point.

I would expect it's due to suppression on mainstream platforms.

And unlike hate-based subcultures like you find in conservatism or disgust-based subcultures present in traditionalist circles which require some ~~targets to criticize~~ hosts to sink their mandibles into and suck the blood out of, the LGBTQIA+, Anti-capitalist, Furry, Weeb, etc subcultures are quite happy existing without the presence of bigots, corpo-simps, or chuds in general.

Not sure about transgender posts, but the communist posts are probably because other platforms are owned by huge corporations, and huge corporations generally don't like communism. Lemmy can never be bought by a huge corporation (at least not entirely).

I don't know if it's just Reddit and Lemmy, but it feels like the internet in general just started trending heavily towards transgender-related stuff in the past few years. Just references to Femboys and trans flags all over the place, it's kind of weird how quickly it gained such traction. I don't have any problem with the trans community, if any of my kids came out as LGBTQ+, I would love them just as much. In high school I literally wore dresses and got beat up and made fun of for being different (more for the punk/goth aesthetic), so I've had some understanding of what they go through, even if I don't identify with any of it personally. I sympathize with what they're going through right now given that an entire political party has decided to turn them into scapegoats.

And I think it's great that they're building a community around themselves and are able to find other people that accept them for who they are, but I find their online communities tend to be incredibly hostile and militant to anybody that is less than completely loyal to the cause. Even just asking questions, giving opinions, or commenting any sort of criticism of their militant behavior gets you banned if you're not 150% supportive. Anything you say is twisted around to make it seem like you're a bigot who completely hates trans people and you're essentially a nazi. It tends to be incredibly negative, like they're looking to be outraged at the slightest provocation. Their tactics tend to be incredibly heavy-handed, just absolutely no tolerance for Cisgender people not understanding their lifestyle.

So I've just started blocking trans and furry content because I just don't care to see it. It's just not my bag, nothing against people that are in that community. The same way nobody else would really care to see if I made posts glorifying heterosexuality and being a boring vanilla binary white guy, I'm just not interested in celebrating lifestyle choices simply for the sake of celebrating it. I'll go to LGBTQ+ weddings and I'll defend anybody's right to love whomever they want or be whatever they want to be, but I just have other things I'm more interested in reading about. Board games, science, technology, politics, climate change, graphic design, art, music, movies, and whatever else other than someone else's sexual identity. Maybe that makes me closed-minded, I don't know, I thought the point was equality?