Ask Lemmy

Lol, no. Where else am I going to hear from the proudly atheist, anarchist, socialist, not-mainstream-and-not-interested folks? Even folks on the outer edges from my own position, like hexbear and lemmygrad, educate in their own way: not so much about what they think but about why they believe what they do. That doesn't mean I want to go roll my brain around in that full time, but I am absolutely better for having encountered them.

I love these comments and opinions when I see them in the wild, and while I may completely disagree, when they are presented courteously they are fascinating and informative.

This next bit is long, but relevant: it's about getting yourself to a point where you are able to see and enjoy the diversity that is already here. Just my opinion, skip it if you want.

You don't have to agree with something to be able to read it. And you don't have to possess, or even form, an opinion of your own just because others express theirs strongly. That need comes from innate human evolution, a deep quiet fear that if you stray too far from the pack or disagree too strongly you will be ostracized and not survive, but in the here and now in online spaces it's just a fear. You can, within your own tolerances, choose to set that aside and just read whatever you want.

Or to see it from the opposite direction, ALL people, including you, including me, derive comfort and security from being in agreement with the herd. But these days, in online spaces, and in every open space where public discourse occurs, that is no longer natural discourse, but a mindfuck: something manipulated beyond recognition by hooking into our primal human fears and using that subtly activated fear as a leash to drag people into thinking, and then doing, what they would otherwise not be inclined to think or do on their own.

That's what fucks it up for the rest of us. Propaganda, bad actors, and endless marketing. Remember how it was when the internet was young? That's the difference between then and now: those three things weren't there then, and the internet was a space as great as we could all make it. But they sure are there now. And if you're human, you too are susceptible to it. I know I am.

So you carefully choose your spaces, you make the effort to know and respect your own tolerances, you take the time to look up sources on your own, and you curate your own feed like your sanity depends on it, because it does.

Some young person told me off many moons ago about how "all people [his] age are overwhelmed" and how he could not be held accountable for his own shitty behavior online because of his resultant "anxiety," while at the same time absolutely refusing to curate his own intake. To me, he was drowning in a flood of negative, low-value content he refused to turn off or even slow.

I feel bad for him because while it is absolutely true that everything, coming at all of us all the time, is a tsunami of mental and emotional overwhelm that never stops, he CAN easily take control of what he chooses to see, and choose to cut it off when it's too much. No one's going to do that for him. But I can choose to do that for myself, and I do.

And that's how I can easily read differing opinions without being threatened by them: they are just that. Opinions. Not even necessarily factual. When you get to that place, the world is your oyster, but it takes constant vigilance. Get lazy and you're back to just doomscrolling the propagandized mainstream mental and emotional manipulations again.

But hit that sweet spot in your own feed and viewing tolerances, and that's when you can see and appreciate the diversity that is already thriving here. Instead of a glance and a discard in a world of one-line comments -- what doomscrolling and social media are made of and count on -- you can actually read, really read and not just skim, and recognize when something is worth more than five seconds or not. The more you actually read and don't just skim, the better and faster you'll become while still enjoying the pleasures that deep reads will bestow.

People are still making ten course meals of real content, but most readers are still hanging out at the food trucks. Only you can find what you're really looking for, but chances are excellent it's already here and you've either trained yourself to look past it, or actively cut it off by blocking it because it was too much trouble to deal with (high noise to signal, bad actors or behaviors, poor moderation, spam, etc). Look again.

I especially tip my hat to dbzer0 forcing new users to write a brief essay on anarchism just to sign up. I don't know if they still do that, but their requirement made me think about something I already knew from the distant past that I had not thought about in years -- Sacco and Vanzetti came to mind, though they are perhaps not the best example of real anarchism, lol -- and given recent world events it has been a VAST personal relief to know that there is a huge, thriving set of alternative philosophies that are NOT just designed to move masses of people through orphan-crushing and value-extraction machines until we all die. (And that's before you get to the scam that is politics in the US.)

So yeah, I've learned more about grassroots populist movements and beliefs just browsing Lemmy in three years than I ever learned in the space of many decades prior, and I can honestly say that while my values have remained the same, my entire worldview has been transformed by quietly hearing and listening to others talk about their own, even when I did not agree.

TL;DR: If you're not seeing diversity, that's a sign to carefully broaden your own scope and tweak your own viewing boundaries.