While I have to admit that I’ve been frustrated by the tankies during my short stay on lemmy.ml, I don’t think that’s a fair representation of their views.
Most I believe seem frustrated by a western world that seem entirely too content in accepting a narrative heavily biased in favor of laissez-faire capitalism and right wing narratives, to the extent that it has blinded them to the cruelty of regimes in China and Russia.
I think that in order to foster a fruitful discussion here and avoid the trenches that often form between differing political views on the web, trying first to understand and empathise with an opposing view is crucial. It’s been a good heuristic for me at least, except in those cases where there is zero intention of even trying to understand each other (where just ignoring works well).
Kind of. I will miss the small communities, the very niche ones. As for the frontpage or r/all, I won’t miss it a bit. The site has grown to a large enough size that most of the content is basically low effort memes and bots, and now the inevitable boot of corporate posturing threatens to kill whatever soul the site once had.
What I’ll miss is the stuff beneath the “surface”, the expert that knows how to fix your problem, the lovely self-proclaimed nerd who recommends my next fantasy series to delve into, the experienced DM that shares his tricks to have a great DnD campaign and the amateur chef that knows exactly how to sous-vide a chuck roast to perfection.
I hope this breadth of content is something that lemmy can grow into, but I think that is more of a long term goal and not something that will spontanously pop into existence once the exodus begins. Finger’s crossed though!