apparently r/anarchism has been in lockdown for quite some time now and they link to their own reddit alternative called raddle.me, which is not fediverse integrated, sadly. they also have a long list of alternatives, but lemmy isn't one of them
That seems to be the case because lemmy's main dev is a ml. (edit: meaning 'marxist leninist, apologies for not being clear on that)
It's somewhat sad for me because the whole philosophy of the fediverse is anarchistic in its core, it is how it should be, it is how the internet should work.
So I wondered - what are the biggest anarchistic communities in the fediverse so far?
It's ridiculous how many people completely dismiss something/someone just because of one thing. True, the main Lemmy devs seem to have some very questionable views on some topics. But they also quite obviously care a lot about privacy, free and open platforms, decentralization of power, I've not found any evidence of them censoring or even shittalking any opposing views, and their goal is to have a world where everyone is well taken care of and there's no corporate greed ruining communities.
I think it is worth pointing out that this entire rivaly (if you can call it that) between lemmy and raddle is wayyy older than the reddit migration. Back them these spaces consisted mostly of leftists and their differences seem much more insignificant now that so many "normies" join the plattform. And I guess this whole federation thing seemed a lot less compelling when there were only of handful active communities about a pretty limited set of topics
Yeah it goes way back to the early days of lemmy, and it should be said that the the main Lemmy developers have from the begining been very welcoming to anarchists, have encouraged and helped anarchists run instances, and generally been very diplomatic and comradely despite obvious ideological differences.
Contrast that with the raddle people who were hostile from the begging and I think still are even opposed to the idea of federation itself -- an irony many have pointed out, anarchists being against decentralization -- the take that 'federation is just a fad' could be said 5 years ago but definitely not now. I think the raddle people are just really attached to their platform postmill and the dev never intended to do federation.
A problem with the whole ML milieu, is you have more serious Marxist-leninists who have very nuanced views of marxism, and are critical of Stalin or Mao and the like, are willing to work with people who disagree with them, and then you have people who call themselves ML's who are really red fash i.e. think Putin is great -- some non-zero number of these people are probably russian or chinese bots, let's be real.
Before lemmygrad all the tankiest* tanks were on the main lemmy.ml and they were were just a bunch of meanies. It's like every day was Tianamen Square ( which is like Christmas in tankistan ) so if you were an anarchist they'd harass the fuck out of you, so this fed into the idea that the "friendly* attitude of the admin's was just a ploy to fuck with anarchists, like a "beware of bolsheviks bearing gifts" type situation and anarchist were being led into some kind of virtual kronstadt. But as time went on the platform grew and those little commissars were gulaged into lemmygrad and that became less of a problem.
And to be fair, anarchists have these kind of liabilities too, like eco extremists and ted k fanboys. And lo and behold they all have accounts on raddle.me
*and no i don't just call everyone a tankie, but if you just love Stalin and dedicate endless hours of your life "debunking" the holodomor, yes, you're a tankie lol
There's no reason to care about any of that, anyone can fork the code and self host. The dev could be neofascist, it would barely just mean that maybe you should audit the code or make sure somebody you trust already did.
to be fair we all are like that to some extend. switching to lemmy is more convenient to us than to many others as we are more tech-savy. Similarly, anarchists who have a garden and the necessary know-how to cultivate their own plants might judge others for buying veggies from the supermarket. They'd have a point but it wouldn't be entirely fair
It’s weird they have more hate for the ml devs of lemmy then the capitalist mega corp devs of Reddit. Also they could fork the software and make their own instance and reach way more people while having a much more anarchist software than the top down control raddle has
You can argue that classical liberalism is marginally more aligned with anarchist traditions than the idiotic form of autocratic ML vanguardism you see around here.
Given the horrendous history of /r/Anarchism's moderation and the fact that Raddle is a direct continuation of that garbage, I'd say it's both no surprise and no loss. Let them go honeypot and jackboot themselves into oblivion. The unfortunate thing, of course, is that they've controlled a forum with a very obvious name for half a decade, and can shepherd a lot of unknowing users into their cesspit with them. But there's probably not a lot that can be done about that.
In IDK like the 2015-2017 timeframe some really edgy people started taking over in /r/metanarchism (the private sub where moderation decisions are made for /r/Anarchism). They formed a clique—a cult, really—and managed to force out anyone else who weren't part of it, totally ignoring even the rules they'd setup themselves for how people were to be banned. Their notion was basically that you had to subscribe to and promote the most violent possible solutions to every situation, and if you didn't jump on board enthusiastically, you weren't a "real anarchist". It was basically the most dark aesthetics of anarchism without any of the actual philosophy.
There were whole drama wars about it, where the people they banned congregated in /r/LeftWithoutEdge, /r/AnarchismOnline, and other subs, and in response the edge cult setup /r/LeftWithSharpEdge, trolled those subs their victims fled to, and harassed people with things like bloody cannibalism fantasies about their victims. Those are the folks still moderating in /r/Anarchism, and they have at least a couple moderators in subs like /r/LateStageCapitalism as well.
One of the most prolific and obsessed trolls is the guy who setup Raddit. He was caught having whole conversation trees with himself in order to fake participation on the site and set its tone. A number of times he declared he was "stepping back" from moderating it and would just run the server...and then didn't.
came there to say that, kbin is nice, but then if you want to go just 'on paper' security and resource efficiency, lemmy is Rust and Kbin is php, lots of people really hate php lol
wouldn't the best take to be to just use the tankie's labor for the
betterment of all mankind? Fuck who makes the shit if it's FOSS.
Personally I think the decentralized solution is some sort of fake-central website that many people can host part of, no one having full control of any one community. kind of like bittorrent in that you have the one torrent file, but the source of the content is pulled from many locations. You could definitely have redunancy in case one server goes down at any time, but not as much as BT where every seeder needs the whole source. spread it all out. take 100 servers connected to the project, split the content into sections, and then layer the redundancy all over so no two servers have the same cache but also that nothing is only on a single server.
I wish I was smart enough to code or even explain this idea better. :( at the very least I hope I inspire someone.
sounds interesting, but I can't quite follow haha
I think the way the fediverse works now is a good balance between individual freedom and feasibility in terms of moderation/hosting
I don't quite agree. Likewise there would be no point in torning down the infrastructure developed by fascists/colonizers - it would make a lot more sense to repurpose it for the general good.
Seems like a classic case of not understanding how the technology works and just assuming that because the developers are disagreeable that means the product is somehow tainted with their ideology.
I agree, decentralized things are inherently anarchic and to throw that to the wayside just because the dev is a tankie is counterproductive.
makes sense. I'm obviously not a fan of tankies, but is there a more neutral term for them? I used "ml", but I assume not all marxist-leninists are also tankies
I completely agree. As a leftist space, Lemmy is friendly only to the most extreme form of authoritarian Leninist traditions and is actively hostile towards left-lib ideas.
These users are also incidentally very dumb. I had someone unironically tell me to read Chomsky while trying to argue in favor of state media censorship. Literally the world's most famous anarchist/libertarian socialist. These people are aggressive, annoying and poorly informed all at the same time.