I’ll offer this thought…

When I used to discuss politics with someone who viewed policy from the perspective of a different political party say 25-30 years ago, I would say 90-95% of what we wanted to see happen in the country was exactly the same. The differences were in how we wanted to get there.

Unfortunately, today I don’t think that the views align much any more. The views have diverged, and at least on the right, they have become extreme to the point of openly courting fascism, government capture by the oligarchy, and the masses supporting this don’t care about the consequences so long as they think they have a punitive moral victory over their opponents. The left isn’t really the left anymore, and I’m not sure what they want for the country. I don’t think they know either. They seem more interested in inclusivity than they do in actually making economic policy benefitting anyone under the upper middle class level.

All that said, I have yet to encounter one single instance of a conservative view on lemmy that wasn’t radical and antagonistic. I have also encountered far left views that were also radical and antagonistic. Far more hard left views than right, perhaps because there are so many hard left views the right stays away.

I don’t have the answer to what would increase the breadth of political content in Lemmy discussions, but the highly polarized and emotional views of politics along with internet anonymity isn’t really a recipe for balanced discussion. We haven’t even touched on organized propaganda deliberately pushing inflammatory posts and lies that incite reactionary and extreme views in return.

It is very rigid in its ideologies, even more so than reddit.

There’s a lot of stuff written on this topic, but I haven’t seen this mentioned yet: there are conservative instances on Lemmy, as a platform. Most of them are widely defederated, not necessarily for the views of the majority (though in some cases, yes), but because of asshats deliberately causing trouble.

Unfortunately, this is also a product of a wider shift in discourse by the right (understood in a North American context), which appeals mostly to edgelords rather than the (rapidly shrinking, already shrunk to the point of irrelevance/non-existence one could argue) thinking, at least ostensibly humanistic conservative.

There’s self-selection in action here. Which makes sense, even if I also find it troubling (there are people who can be reasoned with drowned out by Nazi assholes, who are willing to hear people out on the not-Nazi stuff, give positive reinforcement and with it a home to get radicalized).

I don’t have a good answer, and if I did I’d probably be up for a Nobel Prize given how wide and damaging the problem is. It ain’t just here - it’s pretty much anywhere anyone expresses any idea. I just happen to like this side of the Threadiverse much more, so it’s where I hang out.

Only real hope is meatspace, imo. And even then, not everyone has the privilege to engage this way in meatspace without a direct risk to their personal safety (see POC, our trans brothers and sisters, LGTBQ+ folks, etc.).

lol posting this on the most notoriously censored instance, on a platform intentionally removed from the fediverse for this very reason.

Echo chambers are the flavour of lemmy. Think wrong is quickly censored.

There are many posts preaching for the choir, but I wouldn’t call it an echo chamber. It’s more like a dead sound chamber where the ideas dies in agreement. It doesn’t bounce off the walls or resonate. It’s already there so no answer is required.

Lemmy would benefit from more users playing the devil’s lawyer, but I think it’s too small for anyone to use their main profile for that, and alt-accounts would quickly get blocked or banned.

Actual users with opposing views wouldn’t be of much help. Politics isn’t very nuanced these days. It’s not red or blue, left or right or whatever. It’s polarized into a new duality: Those that give a shit and those who are proud idiots. Lemmy is on the good side of this and will not benefit from being more accepting of idiots.

You sure you’re a leftist? I see more leftism allowed to exist on Lemmy than other platforms, but the majority of it certainly leans neoliberal.

Try criticizing NATO or the Democrats in Lemmy communities. See how fast the powermods and groupthink kick in to put a stop to it.

But of course the rightwing stuff gets targeted, too. The mods here seem keen to mirror the narrow pro-neoliberal Reddit viewpoint of what is acceptable speech. Anything beyond that will result in a strike against the user or instance.

ETA: just got banned from another Lemmy.world community for pointing out the original NATO commanders were Nazis. There you have it.

Given that in the US leftist perspectives on anything are few and hard to come by, I welcome Lemmy’s primarily leftist slant on things. Should one want to get a fascist or center/center right perspective, pretty much everything in the mass media in the US will provide that.

I have noticed this trend. On the one hand, “Truth has a liberal bias” has always been true. If a community is geared towards truth and evidence, like as not it will lean left. There is copious evidence for this, for any random topic.

On the other hand, it has resulted in a lot of “I downvote complexity” behavior, which is, in my view, problematic. It is very easy to take stances of ideological purity online, and behave as if any recognition of greater complexity is EVIL!!1! I see this again and again. This is a way to make your ideological movement irrelevant and unworkable.

As much as folks decry the rigor of the MAGA right, where fealty to Trump is the only virtue, the Progressive left exhibits the exact same rigor, the exact same intolerance for deviation from its allies. Both Progressives and MAGAts see this as a virtue, but it very much is not: it locks you into a worldview that eliminates important complexity and any ability to see things from alternate perspectives. If you have a belief that your perspective is the only correct one, then the vast majority of the time, you’re wrong.