Is it just me or do Lemmy communities tend to skew left wing? Why might this be?
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?
This almost feels like bait, your instance is Lemmy.ml. The ml stands for Marxist-Leninist, your home instance is literally the home for far-left ideology. You'll still see a leftist bant for the reasons commenters have mentioned, but the single biggest reason is that your instance is owned and operated by them.
It's the second largest instance, plus it's the original instance. I can see why one or both of those facts might draw someone. Maybe they thought it was hosted in Mali!
Lemm.ee is actually bigger in terms of userbase now. And SJW is about the same size. But .ml still hosts a lot more communities so I guess that also counts for something
Wait that’s really what it stands for? I keep seeing some commotion over it every so often but I thought it was just an abbreviation of a country or something.
Yeah, there are some serious whackos on there. It's a very vocal part of the population. I highly recommend folks try other instances if they aren't hard-left.
Yes, the TLD belongs to Mali. But the reason why the creators of lemmy.ml picked that TLD is because they're Marxists. They're also the creators of Lemmy itself, which is another reason why Lemmy communities tend to be pretty far left: the first instance was literally Marxist, and presumably most of the early users leaned in that direction.
It's funny, the grand majority of users here are from Reddit. The influx was insane, I remember clearly seeing the numbers.
I think there are a lot of bad actors here. People with floods of accounts. I don't know why this is tolerated to the degree it is... But my theory is that there are far less crazies than many might guess. Most folks here are great.