Hear me out: I am a leftist. Don't ban me - this is something i've been thinking about quite a bit recently.
I mean, at a macro level comparing the far left to the alt-right -- we seem to be a lot more focused on egalitarianism (while disagreeing on the means to that end). The alt-right seems to be focused on creating an ethno state, pretty much. Comparing them, the morality clearly skews towards our direction.
However, what concerns me is how we (you and i) are further insulating ourselves into message boards. When I first think about insulation, what comes up to my mind are those idiots who get brainwashed by alt-right facebook propaganda. They interact with it, then that's all they see on their wall, and all of a sudden they are in an echo chamber. We've all heard about these and know how bad they are.
My first thought is: "Oh, well, I'm educated and I read books and theory. I'm not like them. Alt righters are just dumb ass facebook moms who haven't read a book in years."
My second thought is: "Oh, shit. I'm insulating myself JUST like them, though."
I don't know. I'm just kind of conflicted. Left ideologies aren't morally bad, unlike alt-righters. But, at the same time we are creating an echo chamber, just like how /r/thedonald did with thedonald.win -- after we both got banned by a traditional news outlet.
What are the effects of that? Is this good or bad?
oh, i didn't know that they created that site before they were banned.
i don't really have a solution; the idea of an echo chamber is just pretty fascinating to me. there's several professors at my uni doing research about it and i think i kind of want to join 'em.
Lemmy with federation should in theory be less of an echo chamber than something like thedonald.win. It depends on who is willing to federate with us/who we're willing to federate with. I doubt we'd put up with opening things up to terfs or nazis for example but people here would probably enjoy dunking on libertarians.
How does federating work?
An explanation pulled from the discord made by Necco Wafer:
"think of federation as how email works. it doesn't matter if you use yahoo, gmail or run your own email server from your personal computer; you can still email anyone on any of those other services because they all share a common communication standard.
so mastadon, for instance, is like if twitter was more like email. instead of one company hosting everyone's feeds and tweets, people or communities can host their own instance of "twitter", but still follow and communicate with people tweeting from other instances.
its a model for software that allows for counterweights to tech giants' ability to moderate discussion and define the boundaries of discourse
a single body, like twitter or reddit can't just shut down a federated communites they disagree with ideologically, and there are other advantages. Say you don't like something about a platform, from its visual design to the way its algorithm favors posts - you now have the ability to switch to a different host without leaving your community behind.
we will host our chapo instance, but its our hope that other groups (who probably don't want to be under the chapo brand) who want to break away from centralized platforms like reddit will set up their own lemmy instances. In that case, once federation is implemented, you will be able to subscribe to communities on those instances and have them appear in your feed as though they are part of our website, and vice versa
Who wants like 6 companies defining the rules of our online spaces? they can! there is a tool called activitypub which lets all sorts of federated services work together. for instance, from mastadon (federated twitter) , you can subscribe to channels from peertube (federated youtube)
lemmy isnt there yet, but they're actively building the federation functionality, so they will be eventually!"
Thanks!!