A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.
I think it's because it's still smaller than Reddit.
This is just my opinion, but since modern right wing is reactionary they (by definition) require people to react to and rally against. In turn they need people to react to them for validation. Just look at any of the many right wing social media clones, without a "leftist" audience to perform for they inevitably get bored and leave, causing the site to slowly wither and die.
I think its more anarchist which skews moderately left for obvious reasons.
Edit: No mods, no masters ;)
The developers of Lemmy are the type who have jumped the shark when it comes to leftism.
https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/socialism_faq.md#whats-going-on-with-the-uyghurs
I spent 15 minutes looking at all the links and clicking on a few.
North Korea is apparently a functioning democracy that gives its civilians everything they need. They're all extraordinary happy and love their fairly elected leader. The ones who defect only do it because they're filthy, selfish capitalists.
Tiananmen Square was apparently not a massacre of thousands of unarmed civilian student protestors, but the site of a skirmish between capitalist pig armed provocateurs who assaulted and killed soldiers in cold blood and acted surprised when the soldiers (with extraordinary restraint) defended themselves against their attacks, leading to just 200 deaths (including those poor innocent soldiers).
The Uighurs are apparently all happy. The Chinese government forcibly took thousands, no, hundreds of thousands of people from their homes and placed them in camps, all out of a selfless desire to help those poor, misguided souls. There's definitely no cultural oppression, no forced labor, and no human rights abuses. They're just all-inclusive resorts with free "cultural lessons" to help them understand both Uighur and Chinese culture. The CCP loves their Muslim citizens and definitely doesn't consider them terrorists in need of forced reeducation. All the horror stories we've heard from people whose family members were captured, or about forced organ harvesting, or rape and torture, they're all just unproven lies. The Chinese government even offers tours of their Uighur "resorts" to prove to the world that it's a diligent effort to support their Uighur brothers!
It's not corporate based social with a mostly US based audience.
It was literally started because of political censorship of leftists on reddit.
All the right wingers went to Gab, Parler, Voat, Poal, Truth Social and other places.
I'm still new here and still trying to figure out what the community is like.
I consider myself left of center on most (but not all) topics. I have a deep hatred for the GOP and everything they stand for, but I also am willing to nitpick the endless things that the Democrats do wrong. Ultimately I consider myself a pragmatist - in other words, you will never get your left-of-center policies enacted if the country as a whole is still leaning to the far right. Try to shift the country to your side first and THEN go for more progressive stuff. It absolutely doesn't work any other way. Trying to push for change too fast and too much will only get you a ton of blowback which will ultimately hurt your cause.
So having very briefly explained my overall stance even I was surprised by some of the comments I've seen - like far left stuff. But it's weird here because there are just simply not that many people, so even one or two comments in a lightly trafficked thread might make you think a site is heavily biased one way or another.
Also, please note that we have already entered US campaign season. Like the FBI has been warning us for literally years now (but few take seriously), there are indeed "bad actors" out there on various social media platforms (Reddit was notorious for this) trying to sway the US election toward Trump. They will do and say anything for it to happen, and that has been proven time and again. Like they fooled some gay groups a few years back and convinced them that Trump would support them, or back on Reddit reading Bernie-focused subs trying to convince progressives that, once again, Trump was the candidate who Sanders would prefer to win. Wild, and crazy stuff, but all it takes is a few percentage of people to buy into this mess to swing an election. Lemmy is not immune to these propaganda campaigns either.
Since I didn’t subscribe to any communities that are clearly all about politics, I haven’t really noticed many political views in my feed. Just like with Reddit, I’m here mostly for the science and technology.
I'm not surprised that people who reject a platform with centralized authority for shifting to "deliver value to shareholders" mode would be more leftist.
I'm more right leaning and I use this website. I just hate Reddit and it's blatant censorship. Down with the tryants.
What if I told you reddits antiwork was basically a glimpse of everything we're seeing on far left Lemmy. Lemmy just doesn't have a honeymoon stage for it.
So was reddit a long long time ago. I watched and felt it shift to the centre the heavily to the right. Conservatives destroy everything in the world. I don't doubt your favourite communitues will start heavily skewing right soon enough.