The vast majority of liberals who ever comment posts on lemmygrad and hexbear are of the insufferable variety while the ones who are willing to have actual conversations are a very silent faction that we see verry rarely. I think we should find a way to encourage the latter to engage more with us while keeping out the smuglords.
Of course, keeping out smuglords all the while making sure that as much good faith peoples see us could prove difficult and would demand to have a strict management to make it possible given the current conditions off the lemmyverse but I think it would be worth it.
One way I think we could go about it could be to make a pined megathread every week/month depending on what is the most convenient that would be meant specifically for curious liberals to come talk to us. It should have strict healthy debate rules to keep smuglords out and curb excesses from those of us who tend to be too harsh toward even good faith lib, the subjects doesn’t need to be strictly political, in fact I believe that more casual conversation and memes should be encouraged to break with the more serious talk from time to time, we should also encourage varying conversation topics with more economics and political theory as our conversation with liberals tend to center around history and actuality and barely touch on other topics, which I think is kind of a shame.
Of course that’s just an idea I’m throwing out there and I would like everyone to give opinions and ideas below.
Edit: By “good faith peoples” I was mostly thinking of the apolitical peoples, the ones who aren’t really invested in politics, I worded that a bit badly.
I don’t consider myself a liberal by any stretch, but finding myself at odds with ideas espoused here or in other primarily communist instances almost always gets me flamed.
I honestly don’t expect this to go over very well when I say it, but you guys don’t tend to be very inviting to discuss your actual beliefs and ideas. You tend to respond to challenges to those ideas with hostility and labels, and it’s honestly why I stopped engaging a long time ago. It’s just not worth being labeled a liberal and berated by 10 different people who want to get in on the chance to burn someone who dared stumble in here without being in lockstep with your ideas.
All of this to say, you guys definitely have a reputation outside of your instances of being a club too exclusive for the layman to participate, and you very often reinforce that with broad indiscriminate hostility.
I personally keep your instances on my front page because I think it’s healthy to keep different perspectives. But unless in an exceptional circumstance like this one, I’m never going to engage because it never leads to actual discussion.
Anyway, just wanted to put that out there since I maybe fall under the category of who you’re talking about with this idea.