Hard Requirements:
NOT Mastodon. That's simply a different paradigm. NOT tech only. Wide spectrum discussion. NOT an alt-right hive.
Soft Requirements:
A decent mobile interface, preferably a non-crappy iOS app. Not overtly commercial/meme/crypto oriented
Lemmy is the only alternative I have seen so far that has learned from the failures of Voat.
But the userbase is tiny, and smaller than even niche subreddits.
Also there are some people who detest it based on the fact that it is written in Rust.
This manifests itself as liberal spectrum people having to adjust their beliefs with new information, while conservative spectrum people mold new information by their currently existing beliefs. That's pretty black and white, and the truth is much more grey, but if you take this as a model for political conversation, I don't think you'll be disappointed very often.
Someone who thinks their priest is the ultimate arbiter of truth will never be able to come to terms with someone who sees contradictions as the ultimate arbiter of truth.
So it's not that it's politically hostile so much as an enforcement of a core axiom of how truth is arrived at and how disputes are resolved -- in particular that contradictions are wrong. "We aren't going to tolerate conservatism where truth comes from priests and godkings or some ecclesiastic structure" seems fine, if not appealing to me.
Liberalism is a walled garden ideology, and conservatives frequently want to enjoy the garden, despite littering the garden with their efforts to dominate rather than reach consensus.
So "politically hostile" while it sounds like a negative isn't. I mean I am politically hostile towards nazis, rashists, and tankies and don't really want to share a forum with them. American conservatives and "y'all qaeda" in particular are rapidly approaching these ultimately fascist and authoritarian political movements.
But seriously, that's a giant slippery slope and anyone claiming to be on the left should see that. (Unless you're an authoritarian leftist who's for economic centralization but socially conservative).
Speaking as somebody who remembers when my existence was considered 'degenerate', I'm wary of any attempts to put degeneracy on the same level as hate speech.
Neutrality means support for injustice because the cost of enforcing justice is too high.
Would it help if I said "taking a position of neutrality implicitly supports the more powerful and therefore neutrality supports oppression?"
Thanks for sharing :)
Update: The site won't allow me to sign up with Simplelogin aliases or Firefox Relay. It asks for a "real" email address which I personally won't provide. Also, clicking the premium option asks you to download their app. No thanks.
- That landing page is obnoxious. Show me content, not marketing.
- I have 0 interest in installing an app.
- If I installed an app, I would only use it to consume content, not write content.
- It is incredibly hard to write well thought or researched content without a web browser/keyboard.
- The colored thread lines are extremely distracting and obnoxious.
- The default "hinglish" instead of my own language "en-US" is confusing for a
platform that promises to be language agnostic.
- The choice to write text that tells me to click the button, and not creating an
interface where button clicking is natural is UI that could be improved.
- Show that language is seamless, not that I can switch between them.
- "Klan" is synonymous with Ku Klux Klan to Americans, an extremely racist American
organization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan
- Putting "Klan" an organization that hates brown people of any type next to
"brown people twitter" is confusing from an American cultural perspective.
Everyone claims no bias. If someone says unbiased, I do not trust them. I would prefer someone to show me they are self aware of their own bias and know what those bias are.
If I watched news that told me only things I agree with, I would consider that unbiased news. In China, "Taiwan is part of China" is a statement Chinese would consider to have no bias. "unbias" has no practical meaning.
Even if AI isn't optimizing for "engagement"/addiction, there are still bots impersonating users which use AI to influence conversations.
Before reddit there were decentralized forums. Reddit took the idea of forums and centralized it so multiple forums are now hosted on one site.
Desire for threaded discussion still exists, and I think centralization has more network effect benefits than drawbacks.
I think there is definitely a market for threaded discussion with more heavy handed moderation against poorly educated/bad faith people.
In the mean time you don't need an account for Tildes read-only access.