You seem to be assuming the platform is a random, representative sample of the general population, which I don’t think holds up. I think it’s much more likely that there’s a reason the platform skews left, and my guess is that it’s a mix of:
the devs are pretty hardcore socialists, so the people who could put up with that in the early days were left-leaning - this is backed up by lemmy.ml generally being more leftist than most other instances
people too far right for other platforms probably already left for places like Truth Social, Voat (is that still a thing?), and similar platforms
people too far left for other platforms didn’t have a clear place to go AFAICT
people annoyed by Reddit’s corporatism probably lean more left on average; Reddit already leans left, so this would attract the more extreme of that population
That’s my take. I honestly don’t read too much into it, so I generally don’t bother with the political posts because the discussion seems a bit too group think-y to really be constructive.
If you have statistics from a broad, random sample that demonstrate that lemmy opinions are well distributed, I’m happy to change my mind. But “eat the rich” as a meme here really isn’t a thing I’ve experienced in real life, so I really don’t think lemmy is all that politically diverse.
You seem to be assuming the platform is a random, representative sample of the general population, which I don’t think holds up. I think it’s much more likely that there’s a reason the platform skews left, and my guess is that it’s a mix of:
That’s my take. I honestly don’t read too much into it, so I generally don’t bother with the political posts because the discussion seems a bit too group think-y to really be constructive.
If you have statistics from a broad, random sample that demonstrate that lemmy opinions are well distributed, I’m happy to change my mind. But “eat the rich” as a meme here really isn’t a thing I’ve experienced in real life, so I really don’t think lemmy is all that politically diverse.