I've seen a few remarks here and there that have implied sort of matter-of-factly that places like /r/The_Donald have no redeeming value, the community members are awful (and undesirable to have here), their ideas are all reprehensible, etc. I assume that this is mostly just due to the demographic coming primarily from popular reddit mod teams where being anti-Trump is sort of an unspoken requirement - but I don't really know for certain.

It reminds me a little of this woman in a class i had once, who spoke to me about atheists, assumed I was christian just as a matter of course. It's kind of an awkward situation to find yourself in. I don't identify as an atheist, but if someone is mildly insulting atheists, it's uncomfortable. You have to be a covert conservative (or covert center-right, or even left-leaning Trump voter) or else you risk being blasted/flamed/mocked/etc. in places like reddit.

Part of what attracted me to Tildes was the sales pitch that it is to be a community for civil conversation, no hate-speech/bigotry. I think that's a perfect environment for political discussion - far more than shit-flinging and nuclear downvoting on /r/politics. So even if I'm the only MAGA person here, maybe there's a chance we can actually have civil conversations on topics we might initially disagree on...?

Edit: wow! Really happy to have these conversations with folks. Sad that i haven't encountered any fellow (public) Trump voters/supporters yet but very pleased that things have been civil as advertised. ;) Apologies for slow responses, trying to give proper thought and consideration to all the comments!

Edit2: gotta head to bed. sorry to anyone i haven't responded to questions from. feeling a bit like a novelty "And here's our token Trump voter. ha ha, he sure is a quirky one, isn't he, that crazy dictator-enabler!" xP. I'll try to answer any questions I've missed tomorrow. Sleep well, all (well, all who are going to sleep before I get back).

Edit3: Thanks for the open engagement, all you people who live in a different reality!

Still a bit bummed there aren't any MAGA friends here yet, but I've been blown away by how cordial most of you have been (i hope we can retain this culture into the future of the site). For those who are just coming in and don't want to read everything, I'd say a tl;dr of the conversations I've had below is:

• most people here want to engage with others on important topics without the shit flinging,
• some people express disbelief that someone can not be a bigot or racist and vote for Donald Trump,
• I've been repeating in various conversations the Laurel and Yanny thing is a great metaphor for the polarized camps experiencing different realities, seeing different movies on the same screen.

I'm continuing to try to reply to questions, and in the spirit of not provoking heated emotions I have been trying not to argue any of my political beliefs except that both sides are seeing different realities.

Seeing as we're still a small community, I see a lot of familiar faces in every thread.

So if you want to know what other people noticed about you, comment on this post. And reply to others with description of them. I'll try to be active here for several hours also.

Hi everyone, I'm a frontend developer and do a bit of backend work as well. I'd really like to contribute some of my downtime to helping build this site. I've checked out the issue tracker on gitlab and some of the docs, tech goals and announcement, but I'd like to start getting my hands dirty and contribute some code.

• Is there a roadmap for development?
• A feature list to implement?
• Bugs to fix?

How can I help out? What's the best way to get started?

Also for all non-devs, what is the best way that they can start helping out?

... and we're only a few bunch on an alpha website.

While actually the fact of being a small group could be playing a big role in this feeling, it just feel good to realise that some unrest I was feeling in the last months was just due to lack of meaningful discussions.

I was finding myself checking Reddit over and over (the meme about Reddit as an empty refrigerator feel terribly apt today) while I check here a couple times a day and get some interesting insight every. Single. Time.

So, enough rambling and just tank you @Deimos to put this up, that mod from reddit/science that made me discover this platform and every single one of you for providing some quality conversation :)

Keep going on!