I absolutely feel the same. Notice how you had to point out you're left leaning? That just shows how militant and aggressive Lemmy can be that you have to state that just in case.

I like Lemmy, I just wish it was a little less stubborn (and I say that as a left leaning person).

This will likely be an unpopular opinion here, but if you thought reddit was politically opinionated, holy hell Lemmy is 1000 times worse.

That's largely because few people choose Lemmy over Reddit for practical reasons, the real underlying reasons are generally political and ideological differences with Reddit.

I'm left leaning myself, but the majority of the posters here make me look like a moderate.

The majority of Lemmy users (outside of liberal instances like Lemmy.world) are leftists of some sort, ie Marxists or Anarchists. Lemmy's federated structure and FOSS nature make it appealing to anticapitalists, and the lead devs are Marxists.

There are even times when the rhetoric I see is approaching the level of toxicity I see from right-wing internet goers.

Kinda? People with strong beliefs strongly challenge different beliefs.

Fewer political in general is what I want, but it would be nice to see some actual diversity of opinions. Echo chambers are good for absolutely no one.

You're not going to find a place devoid of politics unless you make an instance banning all talk, and even then people will dance around the subject. Everything is political.

As for "echo-chambers," I actually disagree. As a Marxist, I have far more productive conversations with other Marxists about Marxism than I do with liberals. Diverse thoughts don't necessarily mean productive conversations.

I feel most of the extreme views can be moderated with a ban list of several instances (notably hexbear and lemmygrad) and several individuals. The toxicity of the discourse lowers drastically.

I tend to tag users that seem disingenuously pushing agendas, and if they persist in that consequently they go on the ban list.

That improved my experience by miles and made clear that the group of people doing this is actually quite marginal.

Some of the rhetoric here after the attempted assassination on Trump was really terrible.

I've been a big left winger for years but I still think wishing death on others who are politically opposed to you is absolutely awful. These are people who who claim to be on the moral high ground but who are apparently quite unaware of how hypocritical they sound.

Can you imagine what these same people would be saying had the assassination been made on Biden instead of Trump?

Sometimes it's quite apparent how little there is that seperates us from the animals.