We do have our own form of conservatives though. Granted I may be coming at this from an explicitly American stand point. So I'm open to others thoughts. But our "conservatives" have always been authoritarian. Authoritarians are the common enemy. And on the fediverse we certainly have our own authoritarians here as well. Pretty prominent too.

That said, you're always going to have some that go to extremes on one topic or another. Butting heads and stirring up unrest as they jump on everyone not extreme enough in their eyes. Israel Palestine has been heavy with that recently. A lot of people talking passed eachother whom largely agree. In the US the presidential election cycle was like this too. Plenty attacking the only viable challenger of the fascist. Screaming at anyone that acknowledged that it was either going to be the fascist or the Democrat in office. And we'd all prefer the Democrat. Telling us we we're horrible people for acknowledging reality and not being radical enough. It's not going away. It's unfortunately an aspect of human nature.

From time to time we all have to step back and review our own behaviour. To make sure we aren't participating in that sort of behavior ourselves. If everyone did that, things could be better. But my motto is, as long as you aren't authoritarian you aren't explicitly an enemy. And we should work to have a dialogue.

Hmmh. And we tend to dwell in it. There's quite some difference in what I see around me in the real world, and what people make it out to be, what they discuss. Heck, I've even heard the society in the USA, with all the trenched political warfare isn't entirely like it's portrayed and people are still able to share the place with their neighbours or co-workers.

It is deeply problematic, though. At least that's my opinion. A substantial amount of people solely chase the outcry of the day, it's mostly fabricated, plus almost always about what 2 "special" people decide to post on X/TruthSocial. And then everyone is subscribed to simple truths and has to take some extreme position. All the while we're faced with real problems in the world and this mostly takes away and is meant to distract. I blame the attention economy and neoliberalism and I think it's a multifaceted, severe issue with both society and technology. What we should do is have factual conversations and try to face the real challenges we're faced with.

And I do see that as well. Several places on the internet are very nice. Of course not exempt from any general dynamics, but that's part of the game. And once I talk to my neighbours or friends, I see how they're almost exclusively nice people. And I think we can't give up the internet either. That's meant to be a home to constructive people as well, and to have useful debate. I think the Threadiverse has lots of room for improvement, but there's a lot of people trying, and with quite some success.