My participation will be low here for the time being, but this is something that affects all. Brace yourselves.
Additional information that borderline fascistic instances like sopuli.xyz already exist (Finland NATO supporter), and lemmy.one (PrivacyGuides admin) is run by a US/Canada nationalist that defederated Lemmygrad day 1 and calls people here liberals.
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.
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
and what we should start thinking about is when the fascists will start opening their instances
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.
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.
Talk about a cancer cell moment. "infinite growth good infinite growth good if they can't infinitely expand they're baaaaaad"
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.
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?
So they are just trying to make reddit agian, I remember being genuinely annoyed when Beehaw and Sopuli.xyz both got promoted as the go to instances, out of what seemed like nowhere, especialy given they PROUDLY did not associate with us, who at the time would flip and flop with Lemmy.ml as the largest. I now understand why they did it, and wish that more people went there instead of Lemmy.ml, or as this post reads to atleast me, determened to make Lemmy.ml just reddit but a diffrent domain name. I mean that explains the time I have been having over on Lemmy.ml
I wonder if lemmy.ml will do what /r/antiwork failed to do, and slice away all the liberals once the instance has a decent mass. It could honestly go either way.
If it's any reconciliation, Hexbear may be federating with Lemmygrad soon.
Well we didn't really think we were getting all of the Redditors, did we? This website's existence is evidence of the liberal content of much of Reddit as well as it's owners and controllers.
That's not salty, the developers intentionally state it's not the flagship instance and help promote more "centrist" instances have stated a desire to see "mainstread, or liberal" instances to avoid lemmy.ml becoming... what it just became.
I like the idea behind Lemmy. But before the front-page was taken over by reddit-bad posts, you could see that the flagship instance lemmy.ml is largely used for pro-russian propaganda. And the main developers who also run the instance seems to be very OK with that. I honestly would have issues working with such a person.
from my experience, the tankies are (mostly) coming from @lemmygard.ml, not lemmy.ml.
not everyone's cup of tea.
Beehaw excludes that instance and has strong moderation for safe spaces. it's a lovely space. Lemmy.ml is more open, but is not as tolerant to assholery as lemmygrad.ml. and times are... fluid at the moment, so nothing now is how it will be in a day or a week or a month.
I'm sure you do, but why would I expect a rational counterargument from a reactionary whose ideological existence depends entirely on contrarianism rather than logic? and why would I subject myself to pointless and logical-fallacy-fuelled back-and-forth from you?
If your position had a sound argument, I would never have had anything to object to. By the tone of your indigent response, I know I can only expect trolling. i stand to gain nothing by engaging such childishness.
Invading another sovereign nation is wrong (and illegal), and, therefore, Russia is wrong.
Really? I started posting here today and so far I've only received kind and interesting replies, maybe you should try not being so negative if you don't want "assholery" thrown at you.
Why are you posting here if you hate the place and users so much anyway? Just participate in the instances that have the content you like, you don't need to go to the Marxist club to complain about Marxists existing there.