as a person that came from the 3rd world country and new in fediverse environment, i genuinely would like to know about this.
edit: thanks for the replies! sorry, i literally don’t know the reason since i’m not a western lol. twitter/x is too biased especially when musk openly supports trump so i came here and seeing fediverse is mostly are harris or biden (when he’s still up for the candidate) supporters. don’t know about reddit tho, i only use reddit as a forum for linux and programming stuff.
There are/were some users and communities… a couple of Lemmy examples I remember…
Wolfballs was a conservative troll Lemmy server that was quickly defederated by major servers for their antics. They shut they server down after some years, way before Lemmy got to the size it is now.
Old_Geezer (@[email protected]) was a prolific poster and was a long time Lemmy member on Lemmy.ca, had some decent takes, but modded a geopolitics community where daily he posted the right-wing version of Russian propaganda, banning anyone that posted stuff there that went against that narrative. About 3 months ago, he was getting tired of the community pushback, eventually got banned by admins for his moderating behaviour.
[email protected] is an example of an active conservative community on Lemmy. You can see there is one regular poster and nearly all the posts are net downvoted. I request people don’t go there just for the purpose of picking a fight.
Most community mods and site admins don’t proactively remove conservative opinions as long as they aren’t personal attacks or trolling, and that they’re not being xenophobic in a community that’s meant to have safe discussion for a group (e.g. anti-trans rhetoric in a trans-oriented community). However conservative opinions do get downvoted heavily by users, occasionally getting reported which sometimes leads to comment removals and bans. So it can be tiring to keep participating in a generally left-leaning network that rejects or is hostile to them.
Downvoting is peoples choice but yeah banning people or removing comments because you don’t like their vibe is kinda counter productive to growing a platform for everybody.
We are literally filtering out people at the start. Not smart.
Generally that’s how it goes on Lemmy, I find a difference with Reddit is that I see way more -20 or lower comments that have really stupid and disagreeable takes but they’re there for everyone to see instead of getting removed.
The thing is that each server has a different operating philosophy and that’s another strength. Some are more laissez-faire and allow more speech freedom, others are strict either on vibes or on certain topics. Slrpnk is trying out a moderation bot that spots users with regular patterns of downvoted submissions on a community with automatic temp bans, which is interesting to see the variety of tolerance.
The thing is that sometimes you have to filter out the jerks… or else the jerks will be all you have left. Growth is not the only thing you need to foster a healthy online community. You need values that make people want to be there. That’s why the variety of enforcement styles, while it can create echo chambers, it also shows the Fediverse’s strengths.