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A foreword

As /r/genzedong stands in the shadow of Reddit’s raised fist, our community faces tough choices about how to address the situation. Reddit is one of the most valuable resources we have; its large user base and integrated community allows for targeted outreach, education, and agitation. On the other hand, the ubiquity and popularity that Reddit currently enjoys is not evergreen. Reddit, as a noble house in our modern, digital feudalism, will eventually be exhausted by the broader contradiction of which it is a part: that between the masses of internet users and tech companies’ centralized, feudal control. This process is already underway, as seen by developments in Web 3.0 and federated forum structures like lemmy.ml.

Nevertheless, there is still much more runway for these contradictions to sharpen before the change becomes qualitative and we enter a new epoch of digitally represented commons. So, given our position at this stage in the contradiction, we must facilitate its resolution by establishing stable channels by which we can shepherd our comrades into decentralized communities like lemmygrad.ml. We must recognize both aspects and bridge them - investing in lemmygrad.ml at the same time that we maintain a focused yet sufficiently nebulous presence on Reddit that, at key moments and places, offers a path away from its feudal lands.

Freedom from the feudal structure also allows us to overcome the barrier between in-person organizing and digital organizing. While there is no replacement for concrete action inside a united party in the real world, it would be folly to neglect how the nature of the commons have shifted as our technology and society has developed. Federated forums are helpful infrastructure and may play a key role in developing scalable party communications and outreach.

Join us at lemmygrad.ml to help.

Discussion

Right now, the bulk of the activity on Lemmygrad is happening in one community: lemmygrad.ml/c/genzedong. This is expected and completely normal. We are in the immediate aftermath of a mass exodus away from one of the last large, explicit bastions of anti-imperialism and communism on Reddit, and in our haste to settle we have made and populated /c/genzedong, and, in doing so, recreated the home we were familiar with: an all-purpose hub designed to be a seat of ML engagement. However, while familiar, many unfavorable structural features forced upon us by merely existing on Reddit have carried over with us. We became desensitized to the less-than-ideal compromises we made to have a presence on Reddit, and, now that we have stepped outside into greener pastures, our eyes have not quite adjusted to the new opportunities to aid our cause. Let’s accelerate the acclimation!

TL;DR: We are no longer constrained from things as simple as outletting frustration by wishing death on Nazis to the more impactful, such as the freedom to actively organize and educate. There are myriad new ways we can better equip ourselves for the long fight with the tools and technology Lemmy’s federalized structure offers us. We should lean into these changes quickly.

To contribute to this process (which is happening and will continue to happen whether or not we expedite it), I will outline a niche of optimization yet unexplored:

Why Lemmygrad is more than a simple /r/genzedong replacement.

Lemmygrad is an instance of the Lemmy structure. Lemmy instances can be thought of as what subreddits would be if they were hosted on their own separate domain/websites. More accurately, you can also think of Lemmy instances as what Reddit would look like if you could just copy Reddit’s code, buy a domain, and make your own version of Reddit that you own and administrate, instead of some large company in San Fransisco that can delete you and your forum off of their site for stating that there was no massacre in Tiananmen Square. Consequently, we need to treat Lemmygrad as if we stumbled upon an unoccupied yet functional Reddit domain, with full subreddit capability.

We are no longer forced to view /c/genzedong as a catch-all forum for every possible ML post, as a de-facto standard-bearer and home for those posts that have no better place to be posted. As we grow, we should periodically fracture off posts by purpose into new, focused communities.

Among some already-implemented ideas to spark this transition:

What You Should Do Right Now

  • Join Lemmygrad if you haven’t already!
  • Browse through Lemmygrad’s ever-growing list of communities (subreddit equivalents) and subscribe to and engage with those that interest you.
  • Create your own communities to fill important niches we were prevented from imagining at Reddit.
  • Cross-post between communities to give posts in smaller, specified communities visibility in the most popular communities, like lemmygrad.ml/c/genzedong
  • Produce high quality content natively in Lemmygrad, then link to it on targeted Reddit subs to draw in more users
  • Link this post to all places that contain people disenfranchised and disillusioned by Reddit’s looming ban of /r/genzedong (e.g. Reddit, Discord, Telegram, Element, etc…). We need to advertise why Lemmygrad is more than just a knock-off subreddit replacement that will be forgotten about in a month. Moreover, we should aim towards reaching appreciation of the unique opportunities Lemmy presents for the people already inside the community.

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  • Browse Lemmy’s current app offerings. Likely due to a large influx of new accounts and activity, some instance behaviors are unusable on the apps and many users, including myself, have been using the Lemmy web app on our phone’s browsers in the meantime!

Lastly, stay patient - this transition was a long time coming, and it will take weeks if not months for our community to adapt to the new demands and realities and eventually stabilize. For instance, there have been significant periods of downtime where Lemmygrad has been unusable, either due to increased traffic or DDOS efforts (instance behavior on mobile apps has also been unusable, even when the site is accessible). While solutions to these issues do occur, they do not happen overnight. Hang in there :)