comfy

I believe that most of the things people do, or try to do, on reddit (and therefore reddit alternatives) just aren't appropriate for how the site is structured. Reddit is a 'link aggregator', that's what it was designed for. People post links to content.

So it's no surprise that forums are a better option, structurally, for a ton of communities.

Politics is such a complex topic and any simple representation of it will lead to what would appear to be contradictions in a person’s beliefs.

Absolutely. And certainly with this kind of geometric modelling, with a spectrum or plane where these broad and complex concepts are ordered more-than or less-than others.

The political compass is a better representation

I disagree with even this. It's not better, it's equally inappropriate.

The political compass is adding an extra idealist axis to an undefined axis (the linked video explains this in more proper detail). It's just digging further into a hole in an attempt to make it work, when the whole paradigm is wrong. And this is bad, because the compass model has rationalized that undefined, subjective linear spectrum. It helps delude people.

The unfortunate thing is that these show up as small emotes on hexbear.net, so the users generally don't realize they're huge disruptive images to others.

If one can get past the 20 most invasive, tactless, eternally-online members of Hexbear and Lemmygrad, they're generally great places. Unfortunately, those people are the main ones getting attention and alienating people on other instances.

It's disheartening whenever I see a legitimate chance to teach someone something and a Hex account just makes an absolute malicious shitpost that isn't even worth calling a dunk. That, and a couple of highly-active users in particular who will consistently take the worst possible interpretation of a post and insist anyone who disagrees is a bad actor. Sankara would roll in his grave if he could see those post histories.

Me too. COME OUT YE BLACK AND TANS, COME OUT AND FIGHT ME LIKE A MAN.

I want it to succeed and become what reddit used to be.

I want it to exceed what reddit ever was. It's tempting to look back at those days and want to remake it, but really, we can and should go further in making good communities. And with federation, in theory, it's so much easier to have a small town booted up without it constantly feeling an inch from death, the death-struggle of almost all comfy communities that haven't become popular.

eh, reddit leans left

The left-right spectrum isn't a helpful model (Piped link) on an international forum. As you've seen in all the replies, people have very different ideas on what is left and what isn't... there is actually no true definition. Many people will, for example, argue that liberalism is the status quo and therefore centrist since the advent of socialism/anti-capitalism and fascism. This is especially true outside of the Five Eyes countries (US, UK, AUS, etc.) where the political atmosphere is clearly different for historical and cultural reasons. On top of that, reddit is so huge that different communities have noticeably different leanings, so naturally someone will object when any generalization is made.

they both trend towards extreme levels of authoritarian dick sucking

Congratulations, you just pissed off all the anarchists lol

Like some of the top-ranking comments here are saying, that place has a very large proportion of people who were coming from the banned subreddits like The Donald, various straight-up hate communities, and typical alt-right groups. So naturally, alternatives that were founded by anarchists and socialists (raddle, lemmy.ml) were almost always disregarded there, possibly with the exception of the Wolfballs admin (I can't remember too well if they got much attention with the 'they're not all like that' line)

It's always funny to me to see newer users complain about a lot of political (incl. FOSS) users in an inherently political project, which was picked by many precisely because its political values prevent the for-profit shittery that reddit.com has been doing for 15 years, and that alt-right social media alternatives frequently do whenever they get enough users. Yes, we're going to voice our concerns when people show up at the door and want this to be just like reddit was, or bring over the uncritical mainstream ignorance we came over here to avoid.

Back in the day, there was an instance called GTIO where 80% of the posts were from two instances that had later defederated from each other (lemmy.ml and Wolfballs). That one was a pain, you just had to make an alt to really use it.

I want to say pirate culture has a strong history is deplatforming, so it's almost instinct to have a migration fallback plan. But I know they used to have a fallback on raddle.me (anarchist reddit clone) when reddit started forcing them not to host or supply links to content. They had good reason to be prepared and it paid off.

Mander gets my seal of approval. Since the start, it's been what a federated community should be. It has a clear scope and is open for basically everyone to use, not trying to be a redundant general-purpose instance creating the tenth community named '196' and banning half the instances from using it.

I haven't checked it out since before the reddit API influx so things may be different now, but from memory they were explicitly centred around being super friendly and pleasant, to the point where normal disagreements by people on other instances were banworthy there. So they were very quick to defederate from many other instances, especially anything liberal (as in, libre; freedoms) or political.