“Mastodon for Harris” is a Success Story for Fediverse Activism
wedistribute.org
The Mastodon For Harris campaign has raised close to $500,000 within two weeks of being live. It is probably the largest attempt for political organizing on the Fediverse, and may provide a playbook for other efforts going forward.
You are viewing a single comment
Even the fediverse community is now about US elections.
I'll tell you what your "fediverse" is all about: USA. And mainly Trump vs Harris.
It's like nothing else exist. fediverse my @$$.
a lot of instances are really just Redditors who refuse to use reddit. this is especially apparent with the USA defaultism. the best thing you can do is curate the feed with blocked communities and only stay in subscribed, but as we can see here it even bleeds into totally unrelated shit sometimes, so.
It's like the domino theory. If the US falls to fascism, so will the rest of the western world!
"Mr. President, we cannot alOow a tankie gap!!!"
ikr, why do people care? it's not like us politics affects anyone outside the us. this is one country that notoriously doesn't meddle in any other country's matters one bit, and has no armed forces or even political influence outside its own borders.
I think this is a very real observation, with not much that can be done.
The best non-USA people can do is to participate and share/produce content which is not US-centric (ideally in their native language too). Unfortunately many communities, even non political ones, often still default to a US-centric perspective and culture, which makes it hard for people to participate.
It's hard to dance around it, more people are needed.
!yurop@lemm.ee is quite active, on top of the languages communities like !dach@feddit.org or !forumlibre@jlai.lu
!europe!europe@feddit.org comes to mind as a somewhat political community, with a non US focus. It however has a lot of Germans in it.
The US is one of the largest english speaking communities worldwide so its maybe not too wild to expect this from english subcommunities. There is a significant amount of japanese mastodon servers and german lemmy servers
Yeah, I've blocked every US-specific community I've seen on the everything feed but it keeps spilling into seemingly unrelated communities too. And it's only going to get worse.
You'll never wholly escape it without only sticking to Subscribed in my opinion. In comes something from ADHDmemes, oh look, complaint about medication accessibility, in a way specific to the United States of America's healthcare system. Any post where people might complain about a serious issue probably has someone attributing the problem or an underlying problem to some political/government thing in the USA, and complaint/miseryposts are not solely limited to USA Politics communities. If you do manage to combat it mostly by just blocks, hats off to you.
Yeah it's really annoying that USA people talk about USA problems on the internet, then you have to call them out for living in the country they live in and complaining about the problems they deal with. It completely blocks out any other discussion from people living elsewhere because... Reasons?
/s
I really don't get this, like is the implication that other countries have problems too that are blocked out in mainstream communities because there are simply more Americans here?
It's not like we're specifically trying to snuff out any discussion of other countries/cultures issues, we're just dealing with the shit we have to deal with.
I'm a US citizen myself. I don't begrudge people the right to talk about things affecting their lives in an appropriate space (maybe don't post US politics in "non-political memes" lol). However, I also thought I'd empathize with the person I replied to and provide my method of keeping US politics out of my feed, seeing as they don't want to see it. Wanting to avoid certain material yourself ≠ calling out others for making it or wanting to consume it themselves, although I can definitely see how the person I replied to might be more on the "calling out" side than just on the "avoidance" side (not 100% sure of their intent!).
I can tell you that for me, it's because a lot of online discussion of politics tends to encourage me to doomscroll and makes me feel bad in a way news articles don't, so I try to keep my Fediverse feeds politics-free. I stay informed elsewhere. I understand the need to vent out frustration! Things suck sometimes! But I also understand wanting to avoid seeing that kind of stuff, whether your reason is like mine or more akin to "I'm not interested in this and my feed is full of it."
As usual, a nice comment
Aww thanks :)
Definitely fair, I was moreso thinking of an example similar to the ADHDmemes discussion about how bad our Healthcare system is in general, I've seen similar things to that and then someone from another country come in and clearly be irritated that the discussion happened.
I personally blocked feddit and a few French communities because I can't speak German or French lol, if it was in English I might be interested in seeing the discussion even if it's not directly relevant to my personal life. 🤷♂️
The Fediverse is a big beast with a lot of local instances that have nothing to do with US politics (I may be biased as I do help run one - see, eg, !uk_politics@feddit.uk) and the majority of topic specific communities are less US-focused. Hell, you even have !noyank@lemmy.ml. So you can change things around by expanding and/or pruning your yiur subs.
Welcome to Enshitification