this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2023
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Comradeship // Freechat
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Talk about whatever, respecting the rules established by Lemmygrad. Failing to comply with the rules will grant you a few warnings, insisting on breaking them will grant you a beautiful shiny banwall.
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I'm not worried.
We don't have aspirations at lemmygrad to become the biggest or most active instance. We're happy to have a space where we can be with each other. If we wanted to be big we wouldn't be running a communist instance. In fact, we get a lot of new account requests, but we deny a lot of them for being ultras or anarchists (some we let through if they seem good).
Those new arrivals don't understand the nature of federation and the nature of open source software. Like others have said, they want reddit just on a different domain name. Then let them have their Reddit, I'd rather they confine themselves to a single space than spread all over the fediverse.
Frankly Lemmygrad can survive without federation, what's important is that Lemmy is the most advanced open source software to run a link aggregator, no other project comes close. Someone in the reddit thread was saying that because of the devs' political leanings, the project would never grow and this is exactly the type of elitism reddit produces. This person discovered Lemmy yesterday, but has very strong opinions on it and apparently understands the ins and outs of the project. Meanwhile the Lemmy project keeps growing and is the most robust and popular open source alternative to Reddit. But we're sorry our volunteer developers are not slaving away hard enough to produce your toys, great Redditor 🙏
Anyone can use lemmy, and what we should start thinking about is when the fascists will start opening their instances. There is no way you can prevent that at a fundamental code level; lemmy cannot stop anyone from opening their instance. All you can do is defederate from them. The fascists are probably not going to start opening their instances because of said politics from the devs though, so once again tankies are saving libs from fascism and get ostracized for it lol. They've had 4 years to try and coopt this project and they haven't done it.
There is no way we will defederate from Lemmy.ml or that Lemmy.ml will defederate from us. People can clamor for it all they want, it's never gonna happen. If they're not happy on lemmy.ml then they can join one of many dead liberal instances that keep popping up because they want to be administrators of their own space rather than work with others.
We've handled an "exodus" before (they go back to Reddit in the end no matter how much they criticise it), we've handled trolls, we've handled DDoS attacks, they can't bring anything we haven't seen before.
I completely agree that this is most likely a temporary phenomenon, and once things come down in a few weeks a lot of these liberals will stop engaging.
One point I'd like to add is that we should actively participate on lemmy.ml to prevent libs from taking over. The way I look at it is that Lemmygrad is an instance where communists can talk to each other, and lemmy.ml is a place where we can educate people and counter liberal propaganda. It's also valuable for us to see the arguments libs make and how to counter these effectively in a forum that's not fundamentally biased against us.
Agreed, someone merely mentioning they liked a community here started to get a mini brigade (post got 4 quick downs, I'm honestly surprised it recovered and came out positive). Deleted reply was something like "Tankies and communists are cringe". Oh noes, M-Ls on a .ml domain?! How long until they notice the admin's Che profile pictures haha.
On one hand, a little co-ordination can go a long way against votebombing. On the other, I don't want to encourage straight-up brigading.
It's quite a culture shock for lost redditors on Lemmy. They're so used to their views being mainstream and basically unquestioned. All a sudden they're not the absolute majority, and it drives them nuts. I'd advocate to just engage politiely without downvotes first, but if they brigade then we can respond in kind.
Most of these "Reddit refugees" will go back whence they came once they start missing having corporate propaganda shoved down their throats 24/7 I would assume.
Which makes the whole "spirit of starting something new" over there very funny - because you know they'll just crawl back to Reddit at some point anyways. Libs don't have a very long attention span
Without corporations telling them what to think they'd have to develop thoughts of their own, and that's very much at odds with being a liberal.
What did we learn from Wolfballs? (and Bakchodi.... kind of. They don't federate or interact, nor have aspirations for it last I checked, merely being a we-got-booted-from-reddit bunker). Or from Gab and other Mastodon forks? Those are the case studies that come to mind.
We probably have a while, because reactionaries have their own reddit alternatives they've been spinning up since 2015 and earlier, like poast and the communities.win sites, so we probably have some time to think about it before they flood in again.
We can always (and will) block them from federating, but I expect they will try to infiltrate lemmygrad and run DDoS attacks on us. Thankfully we have a pretty strong tech team and all prior attempts have failed.
But before this, liberal Borg/Collective has not moved like this across the internet overnight. The network effect can be overwhelming, and there will be leaks like the user who got ratio'd below. It is best to have an understanding of these other instances popping up, as there are about 10-12 major Lemmy instances now.
I remember lemmy.ml has had a few surges of new users in the past. I don't remember if they were as big as this one, but we'll know in a month or so how many of these new users will actually stay active on Lemmy.
The numbers update once a day on https://join-lemmy.org/instances, lemmy.ml surged up from behind us up to 1.1k and beehaw went from like ~100 to 500, but apart from that the other instances don't show huge numbers. They also block us, so we won't see them posting here.
Everyone should remember to use the report function. It's accessible by clicking the three dots under a comment or post and clicking the flag icon.
And yes, you're all allowed to debate liberals that wander here as much as you want, but please also report them if they're anti-communist or start trolling.
How has your reading been going by the way, comrade?
Not yet read the materials, mainly because of the whole Reddit exodus thing that will be going on for a while. I have to think what to do with my privacy subreddit. I will take time to participate here unless I can fully accept where I stand on the social slider, because I am protective towards this space even if I may have to leave. I did pursue other methods into seeing redpill arguments and Jubilee YT channel middle ground debates related to alphamale/beta/feminism and such.