Will they though? The biggest lemmy instance are a bunch of anti-Democratic pro authoritarian tankies. Maybe these people are too terminally online to attend protests but I don’t think we can just assume Democracy is some universal thing we can rally people behind. As they say, if Republicans can’t win via democracy, they will simply abandon it.
It’s a testament to how popular the Lemmy software is that our little Threadiverse or whatever we want to call it (I’ve also heard just “Verse”, “Forumverse”, etc.) has spread to include so many other instances, world-wide, beyond lemmy.ml.
I would frankly be shocked to discover that instances like lemmy.ml aren’t either mostly populated by bot-farm workers and state actors or by people who’ve been taken in by their rhetoric. They don’t seem very representative of real people who aren’t terminally online with an extremely niche perspective.
Will they though? The biggest lemmy instance are a bunch of anti-Democratic pro authoritarian tankies. Maybe these people are too terminally online to attend protests but I don’t think we can just assume Democracy is some universal thing we can rally people behind. As they say, if Republicans can’t win via democracy, they will simply abandon it.
I think people will support democracy.
That seems like a flaw in this reasoning. I don’t think the behavior of society as a whole can be extrapolated from the behavior of Lemmy users.
Like I said:
“Maybe these people are too terminally online to attend protests”
So I agree you can’t extrapolate the behavior of society as a whole from what happens on Lemmy, but you can use it to pinpoint outliers.
I was just using the .ml instance as one example to show that “democracy” isn’t as universally unifying as OP thinks.
Fwiw, Lemmy.ml self-reports only 2,407 MAUs (Monthly Active Users, which includes posts, comments, or even merely votes).
lemm.ee has >7.4k MAUs and thus >3x the amount on lemmy.ml, while Lemmy.World has 18,603 which makes it >7.7-fold larger.
Lemmy.ml is the #5 instance in terms of MAUs, behind also sh.itjust.works and lemmynsfw.com.
It’s a testament to how popular the Lemmy software is that our little Threadiverse or whatever we want to call it (I’ve also heard just “Verse”, “Forumverse”, etc.) has spread to include so many other instances, world-wide, beyond lemmy.ml.
Ah. Thanks for clarifying!
I would frankly be shocked to discover that instances like lemmy.ml aren’t either mostly populated by bot-farm workers and state actors or by people who’ve been taken in by their rhetoric. They don’t seem very representative of real people who aren’t terminally online with an extremely niche perspective.