This is a new community on a platform that has had a massive surge of users, so there are going to be growing pains for a bit. My goal as a mod is to allow for conversation on both liberal and conservative ideas, and I believe several other mods agree with me. We may become more strict if this does become a liberal community, though.
An important tool for the mod team too is you guys flagging/reporting posts and comments. I check in almost every day and have received no reports for over two weeks. As the community grows, this will become even more important since we can’t read every post or comment. I have read nearly every one though, lol.
This is it, one of the downsides of a decentralized network like the fediverse here is that there is no current way to prevent brigading. It seems like this is mainly just one super MAGA dude ranting and a bunch of brigaders responding. I was going to give it some time and see if it mellowed out as it developed.
I don't think there is any "brigading" going on here.. Just to be clear what brigading actually is:
On reddit, there was a time when there were coordinated and organised efforts to "invade" another communities. For example, there were threads on 4Chan where users linked to subreddits or posts with the aim of having a bunch of users post similar stuff at the same time.
There was also brigading within reddit when one sub would make a post where they coordinate users to post specific comments in specific threads or post similar stuff in a specific subreddit.
As far as I can tell, that's not what is happening here.. There is no coordinated group effort here, it's just that the vast majority of users on lemmy are not conservatives.
I'm actively removing offending posts and banning trolls. Bear with us, moderation tools are lacking, but I promise we're working behind the scenes to keep discussion on topic.
I mean, completely unfederated instances kinda defeat the point. I get along just fine with real liberals and have plenty of views that bridge both. Limiting participation to a single isolated instance is basically pointless, especially as an actual replacement for reddit. Brigading and hostility to anyone that isn't part of the circle jerk is just a disadvantage to the solution to admin/CEO-proofing lemmy as a whole.
Moderating can only go so far for brigading. Mass downvotes aren't something moderators have control over. There's also the risk of what reddit did where tons of subreddits proactively banned people simply for participating in other subreddits without ever posting in the banned subreddit.
The bottom line is that while reddit is super liberal, lemmy is openly hostile to anyone right of center and I don't see any realistic solution to this. Welcome to the growing pains of a 15+ year old system going down and starting over from scratch.