There is perennial discussion about what fediverse servers (Lemmy or otherwise) to recommend to new users. I have a proposal, perhaps not very original but I haven't seen it made often.

Let's just recommend that newbies pick an instance that is located close to them geographically. That's to say: their country, their region, or (ideally) their town.

Some context. Personally, I am not totally sold on social media, federated or otherwise. The evidence is now pretty clear that it causes major social harms. One way it does this is by fuelling polarization around hot-button national and international debates, at the expense of local issues. Reviving democracy is going to mean boosting communities at a local level. This could be a small way to do that.

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[–] JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 5 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Yes indeed, but partly the problem with those places is that their bias towards conflict and toxicity is fueled by ad-based algorithms.

[–] foodandart@lemmy.zip 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Oh man, is it. That is exactly what got me banned from Reddit after 14 years. I'm on old.lemmy.zip and starting to spread out and check other instances and am finding so much delightful stuff! All of it is drama-free and I love it.

[–] jordanlund@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Oh, it absolutely is, AND they have many times the population of lemmy, AND they vote, AND they are largely misinformed.

We have an election here on Tuesday, there is only one thing to vote on, a property tax measure to support the local parks.

OMG the amount of bad information floating around on this!

You can deprogram some people, but getting people to understand that they are being lied to when they spout nonsense like "ZOMG! Property taxes going up 75%!!!" is a tall hill to climb.