Yeah you’re exactly right, as I said we live in completely different and irreconcilable realities. The fact of the matter is, given the option between sitting down with people like myself (Hexbear user) who have extremely different views, or just hitting the button that makes us all go away, the vast majority of people will just hit the button. It’s not really even a liberal thing, people behave that way regardless of ideology (although I think there’s something particular about how atomized and depersonalizing the current state of social media is that makes that kind of behavior more common).

But you see my point — you’re perfectly within your rights to think that everyone who’s a socialist/Marxist/whatever has gone too far or whatever, and not wish to interact with them. Replicate similar preferences across a whole community, though, and it ends up isolating them and creating the situation that the root comment of this thread is lamenting. We’re just little echo chambers siloed off from each other because the cognitive dissonance of experiencing each other’s versions of reality is too much.

It’d also be nice to see a few more viewpoints.

Unfortunately, hasty defederation has made this impossible. It’s too easy for people in a community to ask for defederation instead of confronting other people’s viewpoints. Not to mention that when very contentious topics are brought up and there are whole communities full of people who dedicate a lot of time to reading about and thinking about those topics, it can create a poor situation where that community suddenly starts an outburst of too many disagreeing viewpoints. Compound that with the extremely fractured state of information and media where people live in completely different realities. It gets to be too much, and it’s exceedingly difficult to have a civil conversation when the gulf between 2 communities is so large.

One day this account will be 2 years old and its posts will be recognized for their greatness. But until then, it’ll just be a sockpuppet troll account. Very sad.

People also just downvote stuff they disagree with. If you use the downvotes on a post or comment as the indicator of whether it’s correct or not you’ll just end up believing only the things the majority of the users believe are true, instead of using evidence or any kind of facts.

I’ve only been outside of Hexbear (where there also are no downvotes) for a week and I hate having downvotes. Instead of people replying to something they disagree with with evidence and counterarguments, people just downvote and move on. They really shouldn’t be used to downvote comments people disagree with (because that just promotes groupthink), ideally they’d just be used to downvote spam and low effort stuff; but moderators can take care of that, so what’s the point?