You're in a community on a primarily LGBT instance. One of the most affluent and influential countries in the world has one of their two major political parties trying to declare that anyone who's not cis, white, heterosexual is an aberration that needs to be purged.
An attitude that is attempting to spread to other Western nations.
Something which is either actively affecting, or will potentially effect, many of the members of this instance.
So, uh, anyway... sorry for offending you, but if you don't like things getting spicy then maybe this isn't the place for you.
Tell that to the hordes of people yelling why they won't vote, despite all of this. Discussion with these people is like talking to a brick wall. I don't think this community is appropriate for these exchanges.
that could be part of the problem is you are engaging with the trolls
trolls are there to straw man and be annoying. they get a kick out of every response. consider blocking them and reporting if their takes are bigoted enough.
I don't believe there are hoards of people. They are paid trolls. While there may be a few who are that stupid, I suspect only a few actual humans are running bots and multiple accounts. Ban them.
When almost every top-level comment is people saying this shit and almost every comment has a thread of people arguing over it, the problem is more than a handful of trolls. I think this community isn't equipped to moderate threads that are primarily about US politics.
To be fair: Not purged, just sent to forced re-education camps where they beat the queer out of you with a $59.99 bible, in the name of a loving, tolerant god. But come on, who doesn’t love camp? Amirite?
with no ill will to OP, their comment history shows that they have been involved in heated debates in a grand total of… two. political posts on 196 in the past few days.
i believe OP is misidentifying the issue. trolls. it’s just trolls. :(
I just sorted by hot, then sorted by top 24 hour and top 12 hour, and I don't see what you're talking about. None of the top 10 in any of these three sorts is about American politics
Yeah I am not sure I get where op is even coming from here.
Out of the top 20 of all time, only 5 are even about American politics at all, and arguably 2 of those 5 are not American specific.
Where I'm from, if you're a conservative, leftist women won't fuck you either.
Edit: Ok, I went deeper and kept scrolling (this is honestly a good community, with good memes lol, glad to be here) and, I'm just eyeballing it here, but less than 1 in 5 posts even applies to American politics, and less than half of those is exclusive to it. So honestly, wtf op?
partially my fault i recently made a bad post which poked fun at certain users. who come into us politics posts and blame americans for their own suffering for not having a better system calling them lazy etc. i was literally just like hey that’s not nice lots of americans especially young ones haven’t had a say in their government. comments immediately turned sour and i got called names for “ruining 196” 🙁(even though it’s like always been this way). i deleted the post because i agree it was a bit mean spirited on reflection.
but i made a better one that was more to the point and has been better received. 🙂
No one is sorting by top of all time when they casually browse the community. They're sorting by hot, or something else restricted to a semi-recent time period.
Some advice, just block the users posting the politics, if your Lemmy phone app or the desktop browser version support doing so. If they post stuff you don't want to see now, they'll post stuff you don't want to see again in the future.
Me personally, that's what I do. My mental health is in a tight spot and I don't have the energy for the doomer shit any more, so I'd like to hang onto some of my essence, because I can just wait to go full doomer panic mode if Trump cucks his way into 2024 and starts banning trans people from life (which would affect me).
Also it's worth considering, a lot of these people being "no I want the Dems to lose because some bullshit" might be fucking tankies/accelerationists sneaking in here again, not all of them but a bunch. That idea really clicked when a friend of mine pointed the possibility out.
I'm not that versed in politics because of my similar aversion to it as you seem to have, but I do know those idiots exist, are annoying and loud, and are just contrarion moron cowards who want democracy to end so they can con someone else into doing a whole revolution for them after it gets bad. Even though none of them would last through the getting bad part.
So just block people posting uncomfy memes, ignore Internet psychos, vote in November, including local elections wherever possible, and we'll all hopefully come out of this without too much lasting trauma.
I find reporting trolls and bad faith actors to be far more constructive and also productive then pretending that they don't exist.
If the de facto response is to block these trolls instead of reporting them then there's no way that the situation can get better. Lemmy isn't a free speech platform like Nostr moderation is important and one big part of moderation is reporting trolls and bad faith actors, essentially calling them out to the moderators.
So do your part and report the trolls and psychos and if you don't want to follow up later then block them, but it's important to file a report first.
I can't say the same thing OP says, because I blocked every politics community/magazine I could see when browsing all. But the truth is that most posts and comments, whether politics or not, are related to something about US.
The sad thing is that we can't do anything to bring balance onto the existing instances, so 80% of content will keep being related to US and 20% of content will keep being related to the rest of the world.
The good thing is that an instance called lemmywithout.us or kbinwithout.us could be created, similar to this magazine, but at instance level. Or we can block every community/magazine where most content, whether posts or comments, is related to US.