I can’t say I’ve been using Lemmy for long, but from the get-go it seems that the communities, memes, opinions that get upvoted seem to reflect left-wing ideas.
I’m certainly not complaining, it honestly feels like a breathe of fresh air compared to other social media sites that seem to shift further and further to the far right, though I am curious to hear why this might be the case? Does FOSS tend to attract more left-wing minded people, or does this just happen to be a broadly left-wing microcosm/bubble?
Hope you all have a great day.
It has to do with profit motive. The Fediverse, and the Lemmy sub-protocol, arose when for-profit enterprises (TwitX and Reddit, respectively) began prioritizing their own bottom line over the enrichment of their users.
This has always been the Faustian bargain of social media: you are the product and you receive free content at the cost of advertisements and data mining.
Once the monopolists of the social sphere overstepped their bounds - got too invasive, or tried extracting value directly from the end user - free alternatives formed.
Naturally, the only people self-aware enough to be put off by the exploitation of these monopolists were left-leaning. There’re a lot of people out there who will pay to be cocooned in an echo chamber (viz Truth Social) but leftists like to pretend they’re too good for that shit.
So here we all are, enjoying a methodone drip of social media without all of the optimization and dopamine-tweaking hooks that for-profit socials live by.
It’s not a bad outcome, really, and if someone somehow wants to start a counter-culture right wing node on the fediverse, nothing is stopping him except a total lack of willing participants.
Say what you will about leftists; at least they try new things - and conservatives, as you would expect from the name, do not.
And the fact, that most instance would instantly defederate