I'm new on Lemmy (i.e. programming.dev), but I have the impression that there are the same "corners" with interesting stuff; though I must say that also in my 10 years of Reddit I never went to political communities.

They represent the three most oppressed minorities online: people who think real communism has both been tried and was successful, people who think humans have rights, and programmers who want to talk about actually programming.

Leftists believe reddit is conservative and rightists believe it's liberal, they're both right. The writing was on the wall when reddit went public and rolled out the default subs.

But everyone believes it's hard to find a good discussion about programming and that's where the truth lies. :-)

You're probably talking about either "lemmy.ml" or "lemmy.world" which for some reason people think is the same as Lemmy, probably because that's what it's called. But if I registered hackernews.cloud and filled it with stuff that wouldn't mean HN supported that stuff.

> Lemmy is like all the folks that bought that paid astroturfing and continue it, but sincerely.

The politics you probably have in mind on Lemmy is mostly rooted in the traditional radical left. You probably couldn't really pay human astroturfers to do all that even if you wanted to because it's too baroque and sectarian.

Anyway the general political outlook varies heavily by instance. It's worth knowing what you're getting into when you choose a home instance (or several; federation be damned).