Just blocked lemmy.ml from my Lemmy account, and I swear to god it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done on this platform. My homepage feels actually clean now.
For the past few months I’d been seeing a lot of tankie posting and pretty much far-left propaganda on my feed. It got tiring enough that I finally checked my blocked-user list, and realized pretty much everyone I’d blocked was from lemmy.ml. So I just blocked the whole instance instead.
Saying this as someone who considers themselves a leftist: I used to think Lemmy itself was an echo chamber. Turns out lemmy.ml was the problem the entire time. Probably the reason I tolerated it for so long is that I agreed with a lot of what they posted, but like an oversaturated meme, I’d had enough. Browsing the platform was starting to feel way too tiring instead of fun, which defeats the point of being here in the first place.
The breaking point was seeing some dude post a “meme” implying North Korea and China are basically communist utopias and that the West sucks. I mean, the West does suck, but come on - you’re saying North Korea is the ideal the West should strive for? What the hell…
That’s because adding a 2nd axis does almost nothing to mitigate how insanely reductionist political spectrums are. People are not that simple x1,000,000,000.
Nothing wrong with building models with limitations but one cannot test the political compass to measure how reliable it is at predicting future results.
As such I genuinely think the frustration you’re experiencing is because the people who relate to it the most tend to view people over simplistically, usually because they can’t empathize with any human experience that isn’t theirs. Aka conservatives.
Like me as a progressive can empathize with my conservative family that’s never been exposed to trans people and only fed anti-trans bs. But flip the script and they cannot fathom why I don’t go to church or vote conservative like a good christian. I know because they’ve told me.