I've been playing around with Facebook for the last couple of weeks and the censorship is so crazy these days is isn't funny. But only if you post anti Trump and Elon content, even as a non American. I've already had a couple of posts flagged for 'misinformation' since after Zuckerberg made this announcement and I've seen it happening to other actual Americans too. These 'free speech' people are all fucking jokes and liars and the biggest pearl clutchers whenever someone exercises their free speech to speak against them.

I don't want to start a war or anything but as someone from neither the USA or Europe, Europeans online often come across as even more exceptionalist than Americans, despite the reputation to the contrary. Because, at least in leftish or liberal spaces, no one is more ready to shit on and call out the USA than Americans. And I don't mean they're anti-American or whatever, they just want their country to be better, so they call out all the shit.

Europeans on the other hand often seem more proud and / or defensive about their countries. Maybe they speak openly in their own country specific communities but I don't get the sense that they're as open and friendly to outside input or criticism as the Americans are.

The way I see it, we're all hooked onto the same stream of memes and billionaire owned news sources everywhere across the world. So thinking we're immune to being overtaken by dangerous alt right nonsense and ignoring all the obvious signs would be a very stupid move, wherever you are. If they're not taking this seriously, they're doing exactly what the Americans did and have done since 2016.

Based on a couple of arguments I've now had, they actually sound a lot like manosphere, anti woke people. Just a bit more intelligent and well read. But even the "trans ideology" phrase that they like to use is just their version of "woke agenda".

I think that it is a sect of feminism that has been created and seeded by the same right wing christian nationalist types that are also behind the manosphere and MAGA. The Peter Thiel and Elon Musk types. They realised in the '90s that calling everything "satanic" wasn't working, so they started coming up with new terminology to pull people in.

First it was "SJWs", then "woke" but it all attracts the same kind of people. And "trans ideology" was the term they came up with for women that read and aren't completely dense. So they're all behaving like reborn christians and going around stomping out anything the norm. But they also sincerely believe they're right.

But honestly, based on the conversations I've had so far, all alt right people have the same talking points, which TERFs definitely are a part of. They're just, as I say, not as clearly dumb as other alt right types.

Econ 101 is liberal propaganda. They'd rather use much more trustworthy sources, like uneducated neckbeards ranting on YouTube.

To this day, I will never ever ever touch any Mazda products. All thanks to their dumb fucking zoom zoom advertising campaign about 20 years ago that involved their adverts playing twice during every ad break. Plus they were sponsoring shit, so it was everywhere. I feel like I still have PTSD from it. Fuck Mazda.

Seems to be the fashion these days for supposed left / liberal politicians to 'counter' the opposition by doing exactly what the opposition wants. It's clearly not just the USA where governments are full of useless, half dead pieces of shit that would rather roll over and show their bellies than ever make the effort of standing up for the people who helped them each their positions of power.

This is why the right wing is gaining everywhere. Not because of the wOkE agENdA, not because trans people are allowed to exist. But because the so called defenders of freedom and democracy are spineless, useless, walking corpses that seem more interested in trying to make nazis happy than trying to make society a fair place for all to live.

aside from porn users

IMO, Lemmy is going to miss the boat when Reddit bans porn. When all the OnlyFans people come here to the Reddit alternative and find out that they can't post promotions and links to their own profiles and pin them, and that they probably won't be getting followers because the functionality seems to be sparsely implemented with some platforms / apps allowing it and others not; they're going to look for another platform where they'll be able to promote themselves and not just give away pictures and clips for free with nothing in return.

Had a conversation earlier that made me realise that this place kinda sucks for anyone interested in self promotion. And IMO the devs need to seriously consider this because regardless of how one feels about porn, it's something that has the potential to attract a lot more people here who might come for the porn but stay for the memes.

Yup. This is what right wingers and Christians do. I've often seen people try to claim that right wingers in the USA are different from the rest of the world and I've regularly heard the "not all Christians" line too.

But as someone from a country that used to have a system called 'apartheid', I can tell you that this is exactly what fucking right wing conservative Christians do when given half the chance (and when they don't have the chance, they cry about being discriminated against). Plus every single Christian asshole teacher and authority figure I had to deal with in high school and boarding school were exactly the types that would embrace and love authoritarianism.

Personally I am not shocked at all that these people are doing this. What I am shocked about is that so many fucking idiots actually believed these little fascists when they claimed to be pro free speech and freedom in general. And I cannot put into words the disappointment I feel that so much of gen Z fell for this bullshit. The kids are supposed to be where the hope for the future is. But these kids turned into a bunch of fucking little bootlickers that support the kind of people I've fought against since I was a kid.

they did not answer

Yeah, the Israeli or Russian troll farms that were driving this whole thing and providing the slogans and snappy comebacks have achieved their goal and left now. So now the confused kids that are left don't have any snappy comebacks anymore, except to repeatedly take digs at LGBTQ+ people and reveal the real reason they were drawn into this.

Something I've seen pointed out about Lemmy and I'm starting to notice a little bit occasionally, is that people love 'answering' questions by not really answering and grandstanding a little bit. Someone asks "is there a gen z community?" and the responses they get are things like "who cares about these generation labels?" and no answers to the question.

Here you ask why there's a large amount of downvotes on a particular instance, and not what people's personal philosophy regarding downvotes is, and yet the top answer is someone that came here especially to tell you that they don't care and no one cares.

And these guys are gonna complain about people going to places like Bluesky instead of joining the fediverse. AskReddit was basically the gateway to Reddit for new users.

To try and guess at an answer, even though I'm new here and haven't even seen downvotes for the last few days. I think that people are trying to keep a certain political atmosphere and not let trolls / right wingers / people who are "just asking questions" take over. So votes go hard in that direction. And also I think there's probably a lot more of the types around here that'll have a 'discussion' while downvoting every response they get from you, more than on Reddit. Just going by the sneering that comes with how some harmless questions are answered.

:3

Yeah this was kind of a similar story with Reddit at one point too. When I first looked into Reddit, it was because I had seen it included with the 'share' buttons on various websites and wanted to see what it was. I don't think it was as small as Lemmy when I joined but it was definitely never on the same plateau as Facebook and Twitter.