I’ve been posting in the meme communities in Lemmy for a few months now. For the most part, if I make some silly meme about how broke I am or how bad American healthcare is, it doesn’t get removed and the meme does well. But I’ve had several memes get removed that I was pretty sure don’t violate the rules of the instance or the community and now I’m getting pretty frustrated. In each case, I’ve gone to the modlog and (if there’s any reason given at all) they say that I violated a rule that is written so generally that anything could count as violating it. Meanwhile, a meme about American kids killed in a school shooting makes the top of front page.
Now, if you’ve made it this far, your first reaction is to question whether my posts are crossing the line. But I think all of my memes are pretty light hearted even if they’re about controversial subject matter. Let me give you a few examples.
A few weeks a go I posted a meme with the caption “My wife out-drinking everyone at the table-- Our unborn son:” [picture of Tom the cat in the womb]. I understand abortion is a touchy subject for some people, but it’s not like I was advocating for or against abortion. After that, I posted a meme complaining about the lack of specificity of the rules on Lemmy and that post also got removed. That’s enough to let me know that the mods on that instance (lemmy.ml) will delete anything they disagree with. But I’m sure that a meme about killing the rich 1% with guillotines would stay up no problem.
I know what your thinking: Lemmy is a big place, just post on a different instance. And I thought the same thing. I went over to lemmyshitposts@lemmy.world thinking that if they’re allowing shitposts, then they would have a more lax mod policy. Post a few memes about innocuous things, it goes fine. Then I post a meme that pokes fun at the LGBTQIA+ acronym for being too long and that gets removed too. So I’m coming to the realization that any post that is completely innocuous or anodyne to the mods is fine, but if you even touch on certain subjects (e.g., miscarriages, queer culture, Lemmy’s rules, etc) it will get taken down.
In my experience from lurking around Lemmy, it seems that the big instances are largely populated by stereotypically “reddit-left” people, which includes finding a lot of things offensive (whether they’re actually offended or not) and being relatively hostile to people who don’t seem to share their worldview, seemingly considering it the default that everyone should know and accept. You can see it in this thread as well.
Not being an American and being culturally outside of american partisanship, this has been quite the disappointment for me, but what can you do.
I align with the majority of the politics of “reddit left”, but I also have a sense of humor, so I don’t claim the pearl-clutchers.
Please expand on “reddit-left”.
I cannot speak for someone else, but I’m still willing to chime in.
Slacktivists nominally aligned to social causes, and fairly vocal about them, but unwilling to lift a single finger on what matters.
Patronising towards marginalised groups. Often with an implicit “they shouldn’t empower themselves, they should rely on people like ME to defend them, poor things”.
Eager to defend corporations once they wash something in pink, black, or green, due to ignorance on the impact of the economic system on marginalised groups.
Assumptive as a brick and eager to witch hunt. Including distorting what others say to point fingers, or screeching at any sort of internal criticism as if it was a sign of allegiance to the other side.
Eager to employ Chewbacca defence and whataboutism when called out on blatant prejudice, in a way that sounds as irrational as “I have a black friend so I cannot be transphobic lol lmao”.
They’re the living proof that even a broken clock is right twice a day. Because, even if the alt right is idiotic, idioticising, morally repugnant and epistemically laughable, they might have a point when they say that those guys are “virtue signalling”. They don’t genuinely care about the marginalised groups, and they don’t want to change shit, they care about their own precious OH SO PRECIOUS feelings of “being the good guy”. (Except that the alt right is unable to recognise that their own ranks stink the same putrid smell as those guys, plus everything else.)
This sort of “nominally left-wing, but effectively right-wing” individual is by no means exclusive to Reddit, mind you. And there are plenty exceptions to it, even in that shithole. Even then, if you hit someone claiming to be “left-wing” in Reddit, there’s a good chance that the person is like this.