I came here a few weeks ago after many years of reddit. Altogether I find discussions I enjoy, however, the posts and comments noticeably lean, well, tankie (I didn’t know that term before I came here). It’s not that I am looking for an echo chamber, but I also don’t want to spend my time reading propaganda. I’m really curious about a lot of things outside politics, as well as the opinions and arguments of reasonable people across the political spectrum, but I don’t want to listen to the boring canned lies of fascists and tankies. I realized that people celebrating communist dictators trigger me, and this is something I didn’t have to deal with before I started reading lemmy, I didn’t even know this type existed.
I also notice that accounts created just a few hours in advance come from other instances to brigade political posts. Because of how lemmy works, I can block individual users or communities, but not individual instances. Is there an instance that could be a “safe space” from this kind of brigading and tankie spam? Or a way to use the internet to read interesting things now that blogs died and then Reddit became whatever it became?
Edit: Thanks everyone for the helpful and wholesome comments. Of course, some trolls/wackos showed up as well to say hi.
I find that the trick - or at least the idea - isn’t to go out of the way to avoid such political discussions; it is to seek out spaces with some niche interest. Discussions would then naturally gravitate around the topic of interest, and political discussion usually doesn’t make sense in such a space.
An example topic is anime. Most anime are not political in nature, so commenters in ani.social don’t have the chance to go off-topic and discuss politics.
To use an analogy, let’s say you are a picky eater. You are given some food (think soup, salad, etc), but one of its ingredients is something you don’t like. Rather than try to pick out that one ingredient you dislike bit by bit (which can be tedious), how about adding condiments / dressing / etc to the dish? Enough of those and the taste would change, with the newly-added tastes having overpowered the one you dislike.
In terms of implementation, you basically have to curate your feed somehow. On Lemmy, the straightforward way to do so is to subscribe to topics / communities you are interested in, and participate in just those.
I see your point, and I did spend some time searching for the topics I enjoy, but let’s be honest, there’s not so much traffic. A bunch of niche communities have posts every 1-2 months. So naturally, however you sort, some of the more mainstream content (ie political communities, or political content injected in popular non-political communities) will show up in the feed. Which is not a bad thing in itself, but I just can’t keep reading if the majority of comments are toxic.
I’ve never watched a non political anime. One of My favourite anime is Kaiji, which is about a desperate gambler fighting to get out of debt. I also enjoy Dr Stone, which is about rebuilding society and technology after an apocalypse, and Frieren, which is about an elf’s experiences in a world of humans that moves too fast for her. Those are all political.