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this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2024
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No Stupid Questions
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I think a lot of the people on Lemmy came from Reddit when the whole API thing happened. It was pretty much a boycott. I assume most of the people who cared enough about that to leave were mostly left-leaning.
That's why I'm here, at least.
Edit: not sure about Mastodon, though
Reddit chased away the Trump supporters before the API thing happened. When it did, some people like me who are classic-liberals and libertarians also came over. After all, Lemmy is an inherently libertarian platform even when its users aren't. When I express a political opinion objectionable to leftists, I get several times more down-votes than up-votes but I do get up-votes.
This is an interesting perception, because if you mean American libertarianism then this doesn't really make sense. Lemmy's creators are communist and intended it to be anti-corporate. It is designed in a decentralized manner specifically to avoid situations where companies can own and profit from it.
The kinds of platforms I would see as being libertarian (in the American sense) are the diaspora of privately owned social media companies.
American libertarian just means embarrassed Republican nowadays.
The idea of federation isn't communist
The idea of preventing private ownership and rent-seeking of communication platforms is.
Not all libertarian-leaning people are on board with corporatism; IMO freedom is for people, not businesses.
I respect it but if you're American and trying to take the word back, I'm afraid you're a little too late. It's a political party now and they're all-in on corporatism.
I'm sure even non-Ameticans can tell the difference between an uppercase and lowercase letter L.
Almost no one pays attention to the big-L Libertarian party. Ron and Rand Paul got some attention on the national level but they weren't even members of the party (while in office) and the party itself has never been politically relevant.
I think these days the word is associated more with Silicon Valley techno-libertarians (a group I identify with). These guys favor the free market over government regulation (which isn't really relevant to Reddit) but they're also very sympathetic to free-as-in-speech open-source software.
I hate to break it to you but these are definitely the worst ones. It's what the Gadsden flag waving canned food and gun hording preppers turn into if they end up with tons of money. These are the morons that build bunkers in New Zealand and try to brainstorm ways to keep their post-apocalyptic security guards loyal to them with remote-detonated bomb collars or holding their families hostage.
The preppers are different because they want to be left completely alone. They don't see any acceptable role for government in their lives. I don't think they're being realistic. Freedom isn't free, as the saying goes.
The techno-libertarians are much more engaged with society and do see a role for government, even if that role is small and (at least according to some of them) bizarre by conventional standards. I'm not going to deny that the bunker-building types are involved in the movement. I often don't agree with the weirder people involved, but I like that techno-libertarians are willing to hear people out and judge their ideas rationally rather than shunning them for being weird.
(I think I might have a bunker built if I was rich enough. The expected utility of it is higher than that of, say, a second yacht. Human guards are a dead end. Probably the best thing that can be done if civilization totally collapses and you manage to get inside is blowing up the entrance so that anyone who wants to get to you has to move a thousand tons of rock first. You probably won't ever get to leave, but it's better than what would happen if you did.)
The bunker-building impulse demonstrates what's wrong with libertarianism very well, an irrational attachment to individualism in all things. Libertarians refuse to acknowledge the positive role of nature and community in their lives, instead focusing on the negatives and spending all their energy fighting the very thing that keeps them alive. How long do you think you can last alone in a bunker without any support?
I acknowledge that almost all people (including me) couldn't survive on their own. Even those that could survive (let's say that their bunkers have robust long-term life-support systems) still couldn't live completely alone for many years without going crazy.
I don't reject relationships with other people, but I think they should be between independent individuals who associate with each other only because they both want to. (Violating this principle is sometimes necessary but always undesirable.) You appear to think otherwise, and I suppose that's a fundamental value difference that can't be resolved through debate. I do want to point out that if I were in charge, my rules wouldn't prevent you from voluntarily living life your way. I suspect that your rules wouldn't leave me the analogous option.
Edit: I suppose that I do feel like I have some obligations to my family members despite being related to them through no choice of my own. Is that how collectivists feel (to a lesser extent) about everyone else?
I also believe in autonomy, but everyone has relationships with people they did not choose to associate with due entirely to unavoidable circumstance. This doesn't just apply to family, but to everyone on earth to varying degrees. You are just as dependent on community as you are dependent on nature, a complex web of relationships of which you are a small part. Refusing to acknowledge that these relationships exist because you did not choose to enter them is childish, and it enables you to behave selfishly because you do not take responsibility for your externalities. This is the same pitfall that capitalists dive into to justify pollution and all manner of horrible things.
Maybe you should look into why we have those regulations. - an actual libertarian
What makes you an actual libertarian?
What makes you think you are? Identifying with the sort of people the person who coined the term and defined it. Would have rightfully seen as their enemy.
We have the regulations for a reason. We've already tried the less/no regulation thing. That's the reason we have the regulations. Granted the regulations are ineffective. However the people in charge and Society at Large will not do what it takes to solve the problem outside of regulations. Things like ending generational wealth that almost every Tech bro to an individual benefited heavily from. Or ending they're very exploitative business practices.
I'd be fine with these regulations ending. So long as Society was ready to replace their more neutered threat with something more meaningful. Like the guillotine. Hell who knows. A quick test run on Bezos, Thiel, and Musk might get a decent portion of them to straighten up and fly right. But as long as Society at large worships the new bourgeoisie. Removing regulations from them will only speed up the run-up to another bloody violent revolution. Which I think most people don't want.
If it's libertarian it's libertarian socialist. There's no property or capital on here, posts get boosted by collective voting, not based off your following or account. There's not even an idea of karma, your account means basically nothing here. A capitalist libertarian social media would be something like nostr or what bluesky is claiming it'll eventually do where you completely own your account and your following and you can use that social capital as you wish.
I think this is an example of where the left-right axis isn't the most adequate way of viewing things. The Fediverse in general is anti-authoritarian. You can be all the way from a far-left anarchist to a far-right anarcho-capitalist and still be anti-authoritarian, just like both tankies and nazis are authoritarian.
The devs are Communists and created Lemmy along Communist lines and principles. Libertarians can also agree with Lemmy's structure though.
My experience as well. Though I avoid political munis these days.
As a libertarian liberal, what communities would you recommend? I'm sad there's not a more active free speech community on this platform. The reddit one is such a gross conservative circle jerk rn.
I used to call myself a "left libertarian" but to be frank, after learning more I've found that "anarchist" fits far better. And there's a lot of interesting content out there that I enjoy. I'm not sure who all .world has defederated, but the solar punk instance is always great, our mods are great (Midwest social), some people may find them abrasive, but those are people who maybe don't understand that when you play in someone else's home, you play by their rules.
Also: blahaj, beehaw, and even hexbear is usually entertaining, even if I have some disagreements with them.
The point is, there's a lot out there, depending on who you're federating with.
I don't have anything to suggest on Lemmy. There's so little activity that I participate in every community where I see an interesting post, except for those communities which are specifically for people with some particular set of beliefs which I don't share.
If you're looking beyond Lemmy, there are are the comment sections of the SlateStarCodex/AstralCodexTen blog and the blogs it links to as well as some associated forums and subreddits. You'll find plenty of liberal libertarians and the comments tend to be polite and high-effort, but keep in mind that a dedication to free speech means that people with opinions that can't be discussed elsewhere participate too. It's a bit much for me sometimes.
I left Reddit because of the pro-genocide mods