Everyone with a dissenting viewpoint from your own is not some secret right-wing troll smuggling in the “wrong” viewpoints. You are not helping anyone with this mindset.

I live in a pretty red area. I talk to a lot of people who have a lot of these right wing beliefs. Im not going to pretend these aren’t dogshit takes, they fucking suck. But like this guy is trying to tell you, these views and talking points are very prevalent. We can’t treat these people like right-wing sleeper cell trolls that just want to attack us, they are people who have been misled.

I’ll give you an example. I was talking to someone who was a little upset we were sending billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine. Is this a shit take? Yeah it is, but he didn’t have it because hes some russian fascist who wants to see putin recreate the USSR, he’s just living in the COL crisis like everyone else. When I pointed out it was a shit move to let ukraine burn and made him think about it, he changed his mind. Theres other shit we spend way more money on, like our military, and we should defend a country that is being annexed by another world power.

He’s not a bad dude. He just hadn’t stopped to think about it. If i had just attacked him for it he would have just doubled down, because im being an asshole, and why would he adopt the assholes position? Thats how most people are. It sucks but it takes a lot of energy to really sift through all the bullshit, and surviving in todays world is stressful enough as it is for people. Its hard to look at the bigger picture when your smaller, immediate one is so turbulent.

This guy is clearly not deflecting he is genuinely questioning things he’s not sure on. He’s actively saying he’s not very informed and maybe he is wrong but he’s not sure.

Your points are correct but your comments come off like you are being attacked. Just relax man. Its not deflection, he’s asking questions about things he has heard and is unsure on. He is right, republicans are better at messaging and thats why he has heard this shit before.

They might be bots, but I think there’s a good chunk of people who just don’t think about it, so they don’t care. Writing them off as bots won’t change that, but maybe we can help them look a few steps ahead and change some of their minds.

What is more likely? An army of bots has been deployed to astroturf Lemmy already, or people are just ignorant to some of these issues? Probably a mixture of both. But more of Column B I would guess.

The craziest thing to me is that people seem to be lining up to make excuses for Meta. We learned the first week of this migration that defederating can get messy, we saw it right away with Beehaw.

Had Beehaw defederated from the larger instances sooner, then there would have been no outrage in the community over it. But while Lemmy was seeing a lot of growth, a lot of the big communities were being made on beehaw. All of the sudden, people were unable to access these communities properly and they were PISSED.

Guys, look around! Threads has what, 10 million users already? We have like, a hundred thousand, maybe a few hundred thousand at best? They will no doubt have huge communities formed by the time they decide they want to start federating. The ratio of Lemmy/Kbin users to threads users will be 100:1.

If we federate with Meta we basically have no choice but to use the communities they host. People only want to use 1 community (the issue of duplicate communities is brought up daily), so they will flock to the largest one. When Meta decides they don’t want to play nice with us anymore (and they will, it is never profitable to let people access all your content completely free, and shareholders will come knocking), defederation is going to decimate whats left here. Personally I think the place would implode, and many would migrate to where the content is.