Structurally, I don’t think anything is stopping a conservative safe space community from being spun up on one of the more neutral instances. But if conservatives have mainstream safe spaces already on x, Facebook, reddit, and smaller more extreme places like patriot.win, why would they come to lemmy?

“Conservative” can mean a really wide variety of things to people who identify that way. Like the other reply to you, I am not sad there aren’t lemmy communities dedicated to celebrating bad things happening to brown or non-Christian people. But it does seem like a hole to be missing discussions of fiscal responsibility (actual responsibility, not the “two Santas” scam) or how to effectively increase the proportion of children in two-parent households (actual increase, not the “redirect welfare money from poor people to middle-class marriage counseling”).

US conservatism broadly used to have policy pieces I agreed with, but the fake implementation in the times and places they have had power has made me really disillusioned.

It worked to keep gun sales hugely high volume and high profit for decades. “The dems are about to take away your right to buy guns, go buy them now while you can! We’ve said this every election for the last thirty years, but this time it’s serious!”

It sucks so bad that it’s such a long-term effective strategy. Fighting it would mean figuring out how to regulate both social and traditional media to reduce engagement bait lies, but I don’t know if we have a path to that.

In first-past-the-post election systems, campaigning on fear is well established as the winning strategy. In this case the fear the D candidate is playing on - loss of health care access - is more fact-based than the fear the R candidate is playing on - xenophobia - but both campaigns know fear-driven turnout is the only way to win.

I hope ranked choice voting makes more inroads. I am under no illusion it would break the two party system (Australia has used it for eighty years and still has two main parties), but by making second choices relevant it gives a winning election path to a pro-cooperation, get-things-done style of campaign.

You see the same effect in person, too, with HOAs being the most notorious example. But there are many volunteer-based organizations that do incredible good work. Power tripping is a thing to watch out for and build guardrails against, but thankfully it’s not universal.

I work in a manufacturing plant. I am not a programmer, but I work with several supporting my projects on the manufacturing equipment. I find it wild that they stay in the front office building all the time, and are generally resistant to coming out on the plant floor and seeing the physical stuff being made because of their programs. That’s the best part IMO!

I work at a multi-bilion dollar company that would crash to a halt if our Cobol + assembly language Unisys system written in the 80s went offline. It’s hard to predict what will become difficult to replace, but some code has extraordinary staying power.