this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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Fedigrow
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TL;DR: to repetitively talk about certain really common topics outside their place, specially political ones, so all popular threads end being about the same subjects.
NTL;R: Soapboxing is when someone keeps voicing their opinion on something, to gather support. It's fine on itself, or it would if lemmings didn't do it all the bloody time, even outside the place for that discussion. It becomes intrusive.
So for example. There are 99 threads talking about Musk/USA/Trump stuff, and 1 to share cat pictures. Then someone mentions that the orange cat has the same colour as Trump's hair. Vooooooosh! Now the thread is infested with "Trump is evil! Trump is nazi! I HAET TRUMP!". They are intrusively soapboxing their hate against Trump. And now we got 100 threads about Musk/USA/Trump stuff and zero to share cat pictures.
When this happens you'll sometimes see people reacting. "Can we post cat pics here? Could you please keep politics out of this thread? Pleeeease?" style. Then you're bound to get some braindead trash vomiting "ackshyually everything is politics". That is technically correct but utterly idiotic in that context, and effectively conveys "I'm entitled to ruin your thread with this repetitive subject, suck it up".
This happens fairly often in Reddit. But since Lemmy has a more political userbase (not a bad thing per se), here it's all the time. And it usually takes mod intervention to not happen.
Okay, so now I have a word for this behavior, thanks.
I've managed to avoid seeing it too often but that's also through probably getting lucky with tiny, focused communities and only looking at Subscribed (sometimes Local on certain instances—ani.social has been "safe" for avoiding politics in my opinion). And outright refusing meme communities not because I have an issue with memes but because there's usually a depressing "relatable" one where unfortunately yammering about the cause behind that depressing thing is on-topic, and usually attributed to something political.
I do content discovery through trawling through the community list on an instance and picking something cool and following !newcommunities@lemmy.world. For people who don't want to mostly take a "my interests only, everything else can be safely ignored" attitude, or whose interests involve topics that frequently intersect with politics (imagine being into tech, seeing on-topic tech news that… also has political implications or directly talks politics), I'm just really sorry for you right now.