this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
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What “spaces on the left”? Where? Every social media site is either run by the far right for the far right or is like lemmy and is at best fairly moderate.
Bluesky? I run in some circles over there but it stays pretty sanitized. I would dare call it insufferably sane-posting
How'd that happen? The Internet was fairly left up until recently.
Organization and exploitation of the tolerant.
The right wants to meddle and they wanna fight you so they can meddle more. The left don't want to bother, they want everyone to mind their own.
Letting meddlers mind their own means they come to you to meddle and you leave to avoid it and suddenly there's Lemmy in an internet full of people that want to kill you for not being them. The left doesn't fight, it allows.
Close. The internet was never leftist -- as in opposing capitalism. It was at its best the ACLU wing of liberal, and at its worst the age of consent wing of libertarian.
When social media exploded, the internet condensed to just a few aggregator platforms. You now had all this traffic and attention that could be more easily monetized than a million small websites and forums, and that's what happened. Your few companies that own these aggregator platforms now have an enormous financial interest in (1) keeping content palatable to advertisers and (2) keeping regulation and taxes at bay. They accomplish the second in part by cooperating with the U.S. intelligence community, to the point of becoming one of the many industries with a revolving door between their corporate governance and the parts of the actual government that deal with the industry.
Of course any significant leftist communities on these platforms get snuffed out: big business and the American government hate the left. Your ACLU-type liberals get pushed right or out as the impetus to make money drives every decision, with their free speech language selectively co-opted to protect the right. Then your most right-wing party starts to become openly fascist around the time a fascist buys one of the major platforms and removes even the nominal guardrails against the most egregious fascists.
Now we're here: with a few small non-fascist corners of the internet populated by a mix of leftists and liberals.