Read the comments in the chains that are beneath it. https://old.reddit.com/comments/13ylk42/comment/jmnp04a
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.
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.
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.
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.