It seems the fediverse is continuing and growing again. Line go up is probably good!
https://fediverse.observer/stats&months=50
Total users are huge now.
There are many websites out there that pull data from the fediverse. So take that with a grain of salt. But anecdotally I am seeing a small rise in people using the various platforms as each get more mature and servers somewhat stabilize.
Person below is using an incorrect understanding of liberalism too (economic).
When I say liberal, I'm referring to the political philosophy of liberalism, which is rooted in individualism and capital, and emerged through the cisheteropatriarchal and white supremacist system of settler-colonialism. People perceive of this as meaning "progressive" or "freedom" because much of the early rhetoric surrounding liberalism (such as the early republican era in the Americas) involved a claim to moral righteousness under the guise of individual freedoms. Liberalism is the philosophy of capitalism as an economic system (which the other commenter here misidentified as liberalism), but it would be distortive to not recognize the specificities of either respectively.
Since liberalism has been the proponent of capitalism and EuroAmerican imperialism for the past couple centuries, it has developed a durability through the appropriation and subsequent assimilation of potentially challenging political movements; such as those based in social justice. Consequently, liberals have effectively coopted the language of equality and progress as natural elements of its politics, despite it consistently disarming and presently continues its genocidal campaign against vulnerable groups.
Conservatism is less a cohesive set of politics than it is the rhetoric of liberals with grievances about the failure of the system to deliver the privilege they feel entitled to, and which this system does assure them. So, a conservative liberal may vaugely subscribe to the notion of "anti-racism" but will inevitably subscribe to racist values that are more consistent with the imperatives of a white supremacist system than they are challenging of it.
Most people in Europe and North America subscribe to liberalism. Most liberals lack a level of political literacy to identify how they subscribe to it, and many mistake themselves as "leftists" or non-liberal "conservatives," even though their values are actually closely aligned. Since I genuinely do not subscribe to liberalism, many liberals on Lemmy self-report when they take issue with some genuine anti-racism, or any anti-bigotry in general when it doesn't align with their comfort level (most of which have been Canadians or Euros who feel free to openly express these views with the confidence that they're "better than Americans").
I really do not get your point of tying liberalism with colonialism. Fact is that colonialism was done by European monarchies which weren't liberal states at the time. The power structures were feudal. They were only beginning to transition into liberal democracies.
I'm sorry, could you explain how colonialism was confined to, based on what you're saying here, at latest the eighteenth century? Even then, you're saying you don't understand how a political system that emerged in the exact places colonialism benefitted represents a political system that emerged out of colonialism?
Colonialism peaked in 19th century when countries doing it werent liberal democracies. Universal suffrage for men became thing only at the end of century. But widespread demands started in 1848. Before that voting was restricted to income/tax/property.
Not all european liberal democracies had colonies. But it is true that those countries that had them, didn't decolonize after liberalization.
Oh, lying. Well, that makes the most sense, really.
No, liberalism ("liberal democracy" is a bit of a misnomer) did not only emerge at the end of the nineteenth century just because you want to pretend it only counts as liberalism when it includes you. As I said in my original comment, liberalism has always used the rhetoric of freedom and equality while enforcing fundamentally unequal and oppressive systems of power. No, it doesn't start being "real" liberalism when non-property owning men get the right go vote (which, source on thar weirdly specific and inaccurate 1848 date? Go look up Jacksonian Democracy in the 1820s and -30s,, it was something widely demanded from the beginning of the United States). By this merit, there is no such thing as liberalism today, because it isn't an idealized version of itself yet; literally a rationalizing narrative to construct the violence of liberalism not as an inevitability or necessity of this system, but an unfortunate failure of it to live up to the "real" liberal values.
I could tell this was some Euro pro-imperialism narrative before you got to that second section too. This is the kind of historical revisionism they typically deploy to make this brutal system seem coincidental with rather than emergent from the violence they inflicted on the world. No, liberalism does not only need to exist in states that we associate with colonialism (even if it did, it wouldn't be accurate to act like borders stopped material interests in a system of colonialism). Liberalism came from systems that did rely on settler-colonialism for a reason, which is the same reason why the system of knowledge production on race, gender, ability, ethnicity, and humanity that we are forced to engage with happens to construct human life around the imperatives of that system. Could you explain how you're conscious of colonialism while only discussing its system in terms of its most privileged benefactors?
To others who come across this, this user is the exact kind of liberal conservative I'm talking about, and go figure, they're a Euro like I said they'd be.