I experience Lemmy as a reflection of many of the problems in the world; there seems to be little effort to understand and respect different viewpoints. Instead of being curious about opinions one disagrees with, the community often feels almost aggressive. People end up in their own trenches. What about trying to be more open and curious about our differences instead?

Apparently we believe in freedom of speech—so long as the speech is something we agree with....

Have you considered that the reason the community isn't curious about your opinion is because they've heard it dozens of times before? Or maybe your opinion is just rude, or maybe you're posting it in a space that was never for you in the first place?

The entire internet is not and should not be an endless space for you to engage with the MArKetPLAcE OF idEaS. There are plenty of dedicated spaces for that in which every party has already consented to that kind of discussion.

Apparently we believe in freedom of speech—so long as the speech is something we agree with…

Apparently you believe in freedom of speech -- so long as nobody says 'aggressive' things to you.

As long as you're not frequently getting blocked or banned, nobody is trampling on your 'freedom of speech'. You're free to say what you want. And other people are free to say what they they want, even if they use that to say your speech sucks. 'Freedom of speech' doesn't mean people have to be nice to you no matter what you say. It just means you can say it. And then other people get to say their part.

Dont know how you got this impression but i think people are quite civil here. I guess people here have the tendency to be more left leaning. I guess if your opinions dont align with that i can imagine that a lot of people will disagree with you. But i guess this is the "curious about our differences" you talk about. They state their differences after you stated yours.

I don't think this is specific to lemmy. We generally like to hear people agree with us, and social media allows us to
a) find spaces with like-minded people
b) block people we don't like from interacting with us

We put ourselves into echo chambers where our assumptions and opinions are never challenged. You might talk about people with different opinions, but rarely to them. Live in that environment long enough, and you stop to question your convictions, and become increasingly incapable of articulating why you hold them, or to consider the perspective of 'the opponent'.

Welcome to reddit lemmy

Personally attacking OP with strawmen accusations for calling out the platform for being hostile toward differing views is peak irony.

What have you found is not being tolerated?

Its a bad time at the moment. The world is experiencing significant turmoil and you're seeing that reflected in people's responses. People on Lemmy are generally pretty politically aware so they are feeling the despair more than average. In more peaceful times the community was very happy and friendly and I believe it will return to that once things chill.

Its also hard to write thoughtout responses to something everyone agrees with so there only really seems to be a discussion to be had if there is also a disagreement to be had.

It's the karma system. People stop talking to you and start performing for an audience instead. A good dunk never changed anyone's mind - but it wasn't intended to. They were just hoping for applause.

Then other people see what gets applause here and what gets booed, so they tweak their takes to match. Everyone likes applause and nobody wants to be booed. And that's exactly how an echo chamber gets born.

I can tolerate everything except racism, supporting genocide and settler colonialism

I am only intolerant of intolerance.

If you're saying intolerant bullshit, you don't belong in human society.

very few instances have it enabled. calculating it from non-home instance is a bit pointless because heavily downvoted stuff tends to be moderated out and therefore inaccessible

if you mean downvotes in general, i think that's a very good thing, because when you disagree with something, you can just downvote and move on, and when downvotes are out, it's a shield for trolls and assholes, and additionally when disagreeing you feel compelled to comment instead and end up like hexbear

Post scores are visible for individual replies and that's enough to signal to people what views are okay to share and which ones aren't.

Their post history includes anti-immigration views and comments in favor of AI copy-paste posts. I guess that answers it...

I didn't even bother scrolling past that.

To the downvoters:

What makes you disagree? Did OP make some sort of clear point in a different post in their history, or what did I miss? Because right now by downvoting you're just proving OP right. Downvoting without clear cause and interaction. The reply to this comment is a nothing burger.

it's giving a chatbot, your pfp is genai slop, and by now i think you've been reliably informed that fedi in general is generally anti-ai. there is a couple of very good reasons why things are this way. if you don't like this, you are free to fuck off to linkedin, lobsters, hn or some other corporate hellhole

Speaking up for people wanting to cut back on their personal porn use.

I grew up in the 2000s and the internet has always been like this, just more censored now. Seems to me it's just how most people are. Life moves fast and its quicker to read the headline, if you know what i mean

I posted something on !libertarianism@lemmy.world and got downvoted by many whilst I always upvote my opposition so the discussion doesn't get buried. Lmao.

Yeah and it's a good signal about what each instance is like, and where to move to

op: lemmy is so intolerant against my views!

insert untitled goose with a knife chasing op: what views, fucker?

it's not always like this, but it happens so often i'm not surprised

There are instances (such as mine) which have downvoting disabled, which helps somewhat.

Apparently we believe in freedom of speech—so long as the speech is something we agree with….

Nothing here has anything to do with freedom of speech.

Well I fundamentally disagree with that as I've explained above.

Also, very few people just hang on their own instance. You're a sopuli user replying to feddit user in a lemmy.world thread. Anyone can up- and downvote you here. The choise of instance doesn't make much of a difference.

This accurately represents every time someone posted something like this and I saw it lol

Gooning is a god-given right

Unless these people are mute they don't need you to speak for them.

Exhibit A.

Apparently we believe in freedom of speech—so long as the speech is something we agree with….

As already mentioned, it's not exclusive to Lemmy/the Fediverse and then, thx to the Fediverse itself, we still can resist:

• the most important thing is that we're not into some centralized platform whose owner can easily shut out anyone. Banning is still a thing obviously (I regularly hear about admin abusing their power) but one always has the ability to change instance or even to create their own which i is not even an option, say, on Reddit or X.
• Freedom of expression should not mean one should be required to listen to trash ideas. Here again, the Fediverse/Lemmy/Piefed already offers great tools to filter out what and who one doesn't want to hear... without limiting their freedom of expression.
  Meaning that I, for example, am not forced to see the huge amount of low quality posts that are posted (politics and most memes, stuff like that) and that I can also easily block anyone I consider a pain in the butt or that is trying to troll me. Which I do without any hesitation and without ever threatening their own freedom to express themselves. Something I find a lot more friendly to freedom: theirs as well as mine ;)

The issue runs much deeper as, for most people, it seems to not be enough to be able to mute/block someone or some content they disagree with. They want it to vanish for anyone else too. The most... excited even want their author to be removed from the community. So they like to campaign for ban, or worse.

But here again, it's a much wider issue than with the Fediverse.

It's people not being educated anymore to tolerate divergence of opinions and, a lot more worryingly imho, not being able, because of that lack of proper education, to listen to nuanced thoughts and ideas and to be able to understand that we can disagree without having to hate on one another. They seem to live in a black or white world, populated with two groups of people: friends, those that are liking the same things and the same ideas they do, and foes, those who dare not like one or more of those things and ideas the 'friends' like.

As long as that 'logic' is not challenged and put back in its place (trash reasoning) the intolerance to what is different, which hating on one's values and ideals is, won't go away. Around here, like everywhere else.

OP's snarky reference to free speech is hypocritical on its face. The entire thesis of their post is to attack criticism, and criticism is a form of free speech.

Pointing out hypocrisy is not a strawman.

It’s always a persecution complex with them.

Not to mention, “freedom of speech” only applies to laws congress may make (even if they regularly ignore that). There is no “freedom of speech” law across the land that is some god-given right. Admins and mods are free to run their instances and communities as they wish; if you don’t like how they do it then you can leave. “Freeze peach” is always used by conservative snowflakes to cry about having their opinions called reprehensible.

Oh... You know the views.

You're not accurately representing their view neither. At no point have they taken issue with criticism.

It seems you have a basic misunderstanding of how the Fediverse works.

There's no singular Lemmy, there's no singular "community" here. You might be opening an app called Lemmy on your phone, etc., but you need to understand that what you're experiencing is an amalgamation of multiple instances of Lemmy, kbin/mbin, piefed, and other federated social networks.

Think of it as if anyone and everyone was able to run their own little Facebook/Reddit/Twitter instances with different users and rules, and it all went into one big pot at the end, creating a non-curated Feed of Everything (sans de-federated instances).

This means there's no singular community, much like in the world - there's cliques on top of cliques, different groupings mixing and being exposed to each other.

And yes, this often results in certain intolerant elements accidentally stumbling upon safe spaces, where they don't read the specific community's rules (since they see the posts in their main feeds and go directly to the post), and act intolerant. This is an unfortunate, but luckily, quickly moderated side effect of federation.

I actually did scroll past that.

You are the problem, and so are the people who upvoted you without at looking for themselves at all.

This whole post is about OP taking issue with criticism.

I find lemmy a lot more tolerant than most other social media, myself.

I'm a conservative and lemmy is still more welcoming and civil than reddit ever was.

No, it's not - it's about the seeming inability to disagree politely.

The opposite of strawmanning is steelmanning. It's when you recite a person's view back to them in a way that they agree is exactly what they think. Only after that do you move on to actually discussing the disagreement - now that you're both on the same page instead of talking past each other.

I highly doubt OP would agree with your "steelmanning" of what they said.

yeah people dogpile a lot. One person disagrees, very often with a snarky strawman and gets upvoted and people take that as a cue that it's what they are supposed to think, instead of actually thinking for themselves (but they're totes above groupthink)

There is no algorithyn. There needs to be but the cultrure is opposed and has made downvote not a useful signal. Downvote here means 'I disagree with this insightful comment'. Most other places downvote means 'this is trash just one step above so bad the mods should delete it'

some of the mods (.ml) are famious for their delete anything they desagree with.

Problem is you are now in an echo chamber of left wing hate. Oi course the hate of the left wing is different form right wing - but just at evil

I experience Lemmy as a reflection of many of the problems in the world

You've said it yourself. It's not unique to Lemmy. This is just a smaller platform with therefore more biases. You could keep trying and show new visitors with your viewpoints that they have a space here. E.g. Lemmy is slowly becoming less try-hard anarchistic. But honestly with your viewpoints, whether it's about AI or strict immigration, I consider it too difficult and unrealistic currently.

I'm going to struggle writing this because the logic is so hard to follow but db0 blocked my whole (GERMAN) instance because my (again, GERMAN) instance moderates against hate-speech against Jews, making us Zionist fascists, somehow.

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/63525728

Look carefully at the modlogs in the screenshots and understand db0 admins think that it's the feddit.org mods that are in the wrong for removing the hateful comments. It took me several minutes to comprehend that the screenshots were supposed to be proof that Feddit.org people are Zionists, because the mods are removing hate-speech. The screenshots are NOT proof of hatespeech on Feddit against Palestinian people.

In the eyes of db0, the GERMAN INSTANCE IS EVIL because it doesn't platform enough anti-semitism.

The ANARCHIST instance is mad at the GERMAN INSTANCE for not allowing hateful rhetoric of Jewish people.

Just because that's what the USA first amendment regulates, it does not mean that is what the concept itself is.

Mention anything about veganism and watch the comments pile on. The Lemmy group mind is not a fan of anything that challenges their currently held viewpoints.

Veganism in particular is hard for some people, because it pokes holes in their current world view and it effectively says you could be doing more, for people who already view themselves as ethical and caring hearing some of those hard truths can feel like an attack.

And on Lemmy in particular people like to shut down dissenting viewpoints such as those.

And please don't hit me with responses on why you think veganism is dumb, I'm merely making an observation as to what is not tolerated on this platform.

fedi in general is generally anti-ai

There are some very loud people who are anti-ai, but there are also subs like !stable_diffusion@lemmy.dbzer0.com that have over 5k subscribers.