I am not criticizing them, I’m just out of the loop.
I find myself to be a stereotypical Lemmy user. I’m trans, (anarcho-) communist, a programmer and Linux engineer.
I’m older, I transitioned (ugh I hate that word) about 2 decades ago. I got into computers consciously and very intentionally. I knew I’d need to support myself soon and spent a good amount of time thinking what industries or companies might be willing to hire someone like me (this was even before trans people had employment rights in California!). I chose computers because I felt like it was an industry where someone might hire me, I could make enough to survive and pay for surgery, and because it seemed one where my co-workers would be less likely to beat me up or kill me.
When it comes to communism, I have a hunch that being trans forces you to think about society and why you are not accepted, who is causing your troubles and why. It seems apparent why someone so low on the social acceptance ladder as a trans person would be repelled by exploitation based zero-sum systems and attracted to systems that would allow them to survive and thrive.
Linux seemed just fundamentally awesome to me. You mean people could just choose to get together, coordinate, and build one of the most complex things to exist on the planet and give it away for free? Sign me up! I think Lemmy and the Fediverse are attractive for similar reasons.
Thanks for this. It was very well-reasoned, and gave me a perspective I hadn’t thought of before.
Yeah, that’s the reason. Trans girls just often happen to be good at IT and leftist.
> I transitioned (ugh I hate that word)
Slightly off topic but I’m curious, why do you hate that word and is there different wording that you’d prefer?
I’m not sure, I just cringe every time I have to say it. I guess it’s just kinda like referring to one’s puberty as “blossoming” and feeling cringe when talking to friends and you’re like, “…before I blossomed …”. In that case you’d more likely say “when I was a kid”, but I don’t want to say “when I was a dude” lol.
It’s just a personal thing, no issues with the word or those who use it/like it. I don’t have a word I prefer.
Makes sense, thanks for elaborating :)
Not the person you’re replying to, but my guess is that “transition” implies some sort of inner journey, but transitioning is often really about changing how the world views you. You’re still the woman, man, or non-binary entity you always were, you’re just making changes to encourage/force everyone else to see you the same way.
This makes sense, transition also implies I changed from one thing to another, which is how it appears externally I suppose but for me it was more like being let out of a prison where personal expression suddenly became possible. I didn’t change so much as people just started being able to seeing the whole me for the first time.
I was going to say because Linux is a big community on lemmy. And as we all know, Linux users are all either trans or femboys. /s
Ahhh, yes, the good old anarchocommunism, also known as bigotry 😆
Care to explain buddy?
Kinda sounds like you dont know what your talking about.
Did you confuse it with “anarcho-capitalism”?
Why do you think communism would allow you to thrive?
Seriously, take a look at the history of communist countries and tell me which one you think you would have looked to exist in as a trans person 🤣
You’re conflating communism with authoritarianism.
Unregulated capitalism causes more harm than any other form of government not appropriately regulated. It’s worth more thought if you find yourself actively against it. We’ve been indoctrinated hard.
Communism = authoritarianism.
I notice you didn’t answer my question either.
To give you the less complicated answer, communism is an economic system, not a form of government. Communism can and has been authoritarian, but it can also be libertarian or anarchistic. There’s nothing inherently authoritarian about an economy without money and without classes, based on need. It’s just the ideologies that want to (or say they want to) implement it in authoritarian ways that got to run the more famous socialist experiments. If you want to see how non-authoritarian communism worked, there are also historical examples of it, they’re just smaller and lasted less.
Answering your question - in the period where most countries that called themselves communist existed, no capitalist countries accepted trans people either. But you are a capitalist nonetheless no? Huh, I wonder why.
So far communism had only been tried in small groups (where tribal dynamics make it work) and in Soviet and Chinese authoritarian regimes
Communism ≠ command economy
Communism ≠ authoritarianism
Communism = a broad selection of idiologies more or less agreeing with the idea “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”
Several countries have such strong socialist policies in place that they could reasonably be called communist if we didn’t pretend that capitalism was opposite to and incompatible with communism. Capitalism is an excellent technology for extracting from each according to their ability.
“Full communism” where you strive for perfect equality is probably less bad than “full capitalism” where you strive for full freedom of capital. Enough capitalism that you have the incentives it supplies and enough communism that those who won’t or can’t work are paid enough to live healthily and be in a position to seek work if they wish to, seems to be a good and reasonable position.
I’ll answer the other part for the parent comment too
If they fail to fit in to normal culture at work and are so unsuccessful at working, communism gives them a safety net.
- They could have taken a risk and selected a job they expect to enjoy rather than one that will accept them if there’s a safety net
- they could have selected a job they might enjoy rather than one calculated to pay enough to save for gender reassignment surgery if the state would pay for the surgery
- they could have had the surgery earlier (which makes it better) if the state paid for it
It’d be fantastic evidence if we could actually look at documentation of how these small group trials have worked out. Honestly, it’s the first I’m hearing of them.
I don’t understand the word “paid” appearing in your third bullet point. Wouldn’t a communistic society operate without money? Generally speaking, what would a doctor’s motivation be to get 11+ years of medical school + residencies, then perform a difficult operation on a patient that has potential for complications and blame? (In a capitalist society, the motivation would be “Helping people” plus “Money”, tied with hospital-level protections against malpractice suits, but I’m curious about your answer)
> Wouldn’t a communistic society operate without money?
You could have communism with money. People still need a way to allocate resources and barter. I’m out of my depth here, as I’m a socialist but not a communist. However, I recognize that communism isn’t the bogeyman US propaganda (in schools, media, culture) taught me to think of it.
it’s amazing what you see when algorithms aren’t deciding it for you.
Maybe it’s that homophobia and transphobia are so dominant on more popular platforms that there is a natural migration towards more free and liberal platforms. I always wondered why you see more and more racism, hate and such degeneracy the larger a platform becomes.
I think it’s because leftists are, as a group, a lot less toxic and hateful. They are happy to be a tiny community chatting with each other about being a trans furry communist all day every day.
The right on the other hand are, as a group, a bunch of anti social losers who thrive on hating and complaining about stuff. That’s not a sustainable platform because it’s either a miserable experience or it gets shut down for hate speech so they migrate around and attach themselves to heathier communities and complain about those instead.
> leftists are, as a group, a lot less toxic and hateful
Definitely not my experience
I’ll just guess you got shunned or worse criticized for expressing overt bigotry.
I am not a bigot, so I find that extremely unlikely.
Generally it’s because I like capitalism.
> leftists are, as a group, a lot less toxic and hateful
Ahaha! Hate is the core principle of Marx’s manifesto.
lmao here, you should probably read it https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/index.htm
Counterpoint. There’s a lot of furries and trans people on 4chan.
4chan has trans furry Nazis, arguably the most diverse group in existence.
It’s because when platforms get large enough Nazis (not metaphorical ones, actual 1488 self described National Socialists) start targeting them for recruitment purposes.
If you know where to look you can see them organize in real time.
Because the Lemmy software was developed by communist-leaning developers and they have, prior to the reddit exodus, had the biggest communities. As for the transgender related content, the transgender community was one of the largest to leave reddit for Lemmy.
I wonder why disparate and well-meaning communities would leave a social media platform full of outspoken fascists.
And if you’re transgender and your choices for typical ideology for cisgender community members are communist or fascist, the choice is generally going to be communist.
Communists leaning is putting it lightly.
The creators of Lemmy are openly marxist-leninist That why one of the biggest instances was .ml
As in M Marxist L Leninist
the ml as Marxist-Leninist was probably just a coincidence, the real reason is that Mali (.ml) domains used to be free
The issue I have with this is that publicly expressing their love for others is an extremely natural and normal thing to do. Talking openly about your opposite-gender spouse, kissing or holding hands with your partner, going out for a nice date - whatever. These are all totally normal things which people won’t blink at when a heterosexual couple is doing it, yet LGBT people can still be discriminated against for these behaviours. That’s not even getting into trans or gender-non-conforming people, who can be discriminated against simply for existing and presenting the way they do.
I don’t just want to ensure that LGBT people are free from explicit legislative discrimination. I want them to be free from social discrimination as well. Social consequences for being publicly gay are not acceptable, even if people aren’t in favour of more open forms of discrimination.
That’ll be partly down to the communist and transgender coders who helped lay the foundations for this place.
I for one welcome our trans communist overlords
Reddit is living in 2010 while we’re out here building fully automated luxury trans space communism.
That’s a possibility. Since the platform started off on their terms, it’s harder to convince new people of opposing politics to join the community.
A big part is because things like the Fediverse are aligned with the goal of Communists. Do away with the profit motive and constant rat race so we can spend time doing and making great things.
Imagine if Facebook wasn’t interested in ad revenue and data gathering but truly sought to keep people connected and to facilitate communication. No bullshit algorithm, no manipulation to keep people doom scrolling.
On a technical level, federation is arguably just as compatible with libertarianism. Each instance is its own island nation, free to set its own rules while members vote with their feet in free association. That it hasn’t gone that route is more to do with the founding population than the technology.
Trans people and communists are nearly half of software dev. The other half are furries.
How dare you imply most software devs aren’t all three simultaneously
Based off the amount of fury porn communities I’ve blocked, half seems very, very conservative. What’s the old joke, if a bomb went off at a fury convention the Internet would go down?
They’re 90% of FOSS development. Also, their “daily driver” is an old thinkpad running linux – often Arch.
I use Arch btw
uwu
GNU+UwU
It’s more a Venn diagram which includes trans furries, communist furries and the elusive trans communist furry which has only been theorised to exist.
I have proof they exist, there you go
Not sure why this is such a common perception. Most of the software devs I know are pretty average people other than being computer nerds. I met one trans CS student in college but that was it.
Being trans is correlated with autism and you will find a bunch of autistic people in tech, because tech makes more sense to then than humans do. Same with things like videogame speedrunning.
If you don’t see that there is a greater number of trans people than in the general population you might want to look again.
mate he didn’t say in general
he said the devs of Lemmy
normie cs dorkies are chasing 12hr intern jobs at explotative upstarts
youve been here for 17 days and made nearly 500 comments and ive seen you reply with obvious troll comments to every comment on several different posts on here.
You need a life dude.
My assumption is that the bots, shills, astroturfers and other corporate interests haven’t arrived in sufficient quantities yet.
It’s not that there’s more here, just the volume of noise out there is far greater and most of the content generated is for parties who gain no advantage from posing as part of either of those communities.
in a word, intersectionality. you’re getting people who were already looking for an excuse to ditch reddit and twitter, and of that group, you’re selecting the ones with the most tech literacy. That tends to overlap people with progressive politics.
The more transgender related posts are mostly because 196 a very large queer and especially trans friendly subreddit closed permanently and migrated wholesale to a instance called blahajzone. If you look at r/place right now you can tell the absence of 196 by the fact there are very few queer symbols on r/place compared to last year where 196 and associated subs had coordinated artworks and defense campaigns for their flags. I’m pretty sure last time they managed to take over the American flag and force it to move to another spot on the canvas. Now there are two small flags and nothing else.
i can vouch for that as someone who participated this year. even maintaining a bunch of barcode flags on the canvas near the painting frame was difficult because of how little people we had.
People congregate where they feel safe. Sometimes that looks like the nerdy introverted kid living life on the internet when their immediate community doesn’t understand them, and the roles they’re expected to play don’t work for them. Turns out a lot of nerdy introverted kids who felt misunderstood by their families were trans, which isn’t too surprising.
What’s interesting to me is that most trans-people in tech are AMAB, and I think that reflects computers being seen as an ok “masculine” hobby (in lieu of sports or cars, etc.) . I often wonder where all the AFAB transpeeps end up instead, I know they’re somewhere!
The way I understand from what I’ve seen and read is that these are mostly people who were banned, shunned or chased away from other platforms. While Reddit can ban you, you can just spin up an instance of Lemmy, Mastodon or whatever yourself and play by your own rules.
Interestingly, on Reddit there were tons of trans related posts and comments, but what I see here (and other fedi platforms) is trans people posting whatever interests them, and not about being trans. It’s like they can just be themselves without people constantly talking about or questioning their identity.
IDK, I see tons of left and trans content on YT and Twitter, for example. That is because that’s the type of content I like, and the type of people I follow. I suspect what you’re noticing isn’t so much the presence of communism and trans people, but the absence of dumb shit.
Not an especially intolerant of others group.
It’s less which group applies to me, it’s which group do I not mind sharing a space with.
I can look at a trans post and either think lol or I don’t get it.
I see a fascist/racist post and not think it’s funny, and that it makes me kind of sad.
I would expect it’s due to suppression on mainstream platforms.
And unlike hate-based subcultures like you find in conservatism or disgust-based subcultures present in traditionalist circles which require some
targets to criticizehosts to sink their mandibles into and suck the blood out of, the LGBTQIA+, Anti-capitalist, Furry, Weeb, etc subcultures are quite happy existing without the presence of bigots, corpo-simps, or chuds in general.because the fediverse is a place where the admins choose to federate with whoever they want and get to choose what are the policies in their own instances. so you got a chance to stop the hatred and harrasment trans people are victim of on other social plateform where the company don’t want to dive into “political” stuff
it’s kind of a safe space online for trans and lgbt for that reason
I don’t know if it’s just Reddit and Lemmy, but it feels like the internet in general just started trending heavily towards transgender-related stuff in the past few years. Just references to Femboys and trans flags all over the place, it’s kind of weird how quickly it gained such traction. I don’t have any problem with the trans community, if any of my kids came out as LGBTQ+, I would love them just as much. In high school I literally wore dresses and got beat up and made fun of for being different (more for the punk/goth aesthetic), so I’ve had some understanding of what they go through, even if I don’t identify with any of it personally. I sympathize with what they’re going through right now given that an entire political party has decided to turn them into scapegoats.
And I think it’s great that they’re building a community around themselves and are able to find other people that accept them for who they are, but I find their online communities tend to be incredibly hostile and militant to anybody that is less than completely loyal to the cause. Even just asking questions, giving opinions, or commenting any sort of criticism of their militant behavior gets you banned if you’re not 150% supportive. Anything you say is twisted around to make it seem like you’re a bigot who completely hates trans people and you’re essentially a nazi. It tends to be incredibly negative, like they’re looking to be outraged at the slightest provocation. Their tactics tend to be incredibly heavy-handed, just absolutely no tolerance for Cisgender people not understanding their lifestyle.
So I’ve just started blocking trans and furry content because I just don’t care to see it. It’s just not my bag, nothing against people that are in that community. The same way nobody else would really care to see if I made posts glorifying heterosexuality and being a boring vanilla binary white guy, I’m just not interested in celebrating lifestyle choices simply for the sake of celebrating it. I’ll go to LGBTQ+ weddings and I’ll defend anybody’s right to love whomever they want or be whatever they want to be, but I just have other things I’m more interested in reading about. Board games, science, technology, politics, climate change, graphic design, art, music, movies, and whatever else other than someone else’s sexual identity. Maybe that makes me closed-minded, I don’t know, I thought the point was equality?
If you block furry stuff you’ll miss out on a lot of network security news
I’m not seeing any of what you’re describing, maybe you should edit your subscriptions and then filter to Subscribed so you’re only getting content that interests you? I think it’s great for people to have an environment where they can celebrate life events that should be allowed to bring them unqualified joy, but IRL may draw snide comments and abuse from families and strangers and coworkers. I’m an old cis het white mom, but maybe I need to seek out some of those communities and spread a bunch of upvotes like confetti at a wedding.
I saw some new-atheist style anti-mulsim racist trans women online the other day.
Given how men are more likely to be openly racist online, I’ve been waiting for the honeymoon phase of liberal type trans activism to taper off, much like how you can find many right wing LGB people online today, but as this post suggests, they’re mostly liberal for now.
That doesn’t make you closed-minded, it actually makes you a free thinker. Nobody should have to share or weigh in on the obsessions of the media at any time. Awareness is good but the media doesn’t exactly give us healthy things to think about. The world is so much more than just mass shootings, identity politics, and loudmouths with too much money and power.
