so r/anarchism does not endorse lemmy

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?

edit: here some context I found on raddle: 1 2 3

totallynotarobot,

What’s “a ml" in this context?

Is the dev really teeny and takes up only a cubic centimetre when liquified?

ikiru,

Marxist-Leninist.

Kinda funny they reject Lemmy for that but didn’t reject reddit for being a capitalist but okay. There are instances ran by anarchists too.

I just got your joke. wooosh

totallynotarobot,

I was genuinely asking too tho, thank you for the explanation!

ikiru,

Oh, good. No worries! Haha

socsa,

Reddit has plenty of good left/socialist spaces which aren’t just ML mind rot though.

nichtsowichtig,

There are instances ran by anarchists too.

cool! which ones?

poVoq,
@poVoq@slrpnk.net avatar

Slrpnk.net feel free to join us, but we are a strictly tankie free zone (lemmygrad and Hexbear are Blocked).

lemmy.dbzer0.com is another one.

nichtsowichtig,

awesome! thanks a lot. I think slrpnk hits the right notes for me :]

ikiru,

Yeah, I’ll check out slrpnk too but I was thinking of dbzer0. I have a backup account there if something happens to this one, which is my original.

AnarchistArtificer,

I love being on Slrpnk.net. When I was searching for an instance to join, I wanted one that wasn’t too big and wasn’t too small, and this has ended up being perfect

MxM111,
MxM111 avatar

What do they think about kbin ? It is part of fediverse, but not developed by ML.

o_0,

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

user23,

deleted_by_author

    •
    elbarto777,

    I just saw a pokemon post here today and felt so sad.

    God I hated the pokemon references on reddit so much.

    CluckN,

    Damn your like the Team Rocket of Pokémon references.

    slicedcheesegremlin,
    slicedcheesegremlin avatar

    I wish there was more of that stuff on the fediverse. I am so fucking tired of seeing nothing but political and anti-reddit circlejerk, since every time I log on here that's all I ever see. I don't even disagree with it, it's just that there is only so much "we are all going to die and there is nothing we can do about it!" outrage I can handle and it's making me constantly miserable, and this was part of why I left Reddit in the first place.

    mihnt,
    mihnt avatar

    Block those communities. Seriously. If you use this place to decompress and relax, delete the stressors.

    elbarto777,

    Then walk in my shoes, brother. Seeing pokemon bullshit everywhere, even in comment sections that have nothing to do with pokemons, got reaaaally old on reddit.

    “A pic of a caterpillar”

    “Charizard amirite? Lel!”

    mihnt,
    mihnt avatar

    Take your distaste for pokemon and apply it to all anime and you would be me.

    riley,

    Tell that to all the anarchists using lemmy. Also, “tankie” only means its user is a tribalist.

    ReadFanon,
    @ReadFanon@lemmygrad.ml avatar

    I never trusted Raddle back when I was an anarchist and why would you with a dev who acts like this?

    socsa,

    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.

    thepaperpilot,

    I’m sorry, I’m not sure I’ve seen what you’re talking about? Admittedly I’m on beehaw which is defederated from lemmygrad and several other instances, but it also has this community, and the sidebar links to a half dozen other anarchist communities. I agree with OP that federation as a concept is anarchistic in its core, and I don’t see the argument for how it could be considered friendly only to extreme authoritarianism.

    As far as the users on the fediverse go, but most of the communities I’m in are either explicitly leftist or anarchist, or lean left (like 196, for example). Even on the “normie” communities like memes and stuff, I regularly see a meme referring to a leftist idea, some comment(s) decrying some typical capitalist propaganda like “but communism is only a fictitious ideal”, and then many people responding with corrections on what communism or anarchism actually are, what a non-authoritarian leftist society would look like, etc. and they get more upvotes than the propaganda comment! I just really haven’t seen any of this “left-lib hostility” you’re talking about.

    socsa,

    Go through my profile if you want to see it. Look for the downvoted comments.

    thepaperpilot,

    Alright, looked through a bit and I definitely see some of what you’re talking about in lemmy.ml/c/worldnews. Some of them I think were downvoted for other reasons, but there’s enough where I see your point. I’d argue that, similar to how the original devs being ML doesn’t mean much, so does one community (or even many) leaning one way. The whole appeal of federation is you/we can find a world news on a anarchist instance, for example, or any world news community that just happens to more closely align. Such an instance could also defed from the authoritarian left instances as well, etc. etc. Since there is no centralized authority on lemmy/the fediverse, there’s quite literally nothing they can do to prevent this.

    socsa,

    Trust me, I get that. It’s just that this is one of the largest worldnews forums on the fediverse at the moment, so there aren’t many options yet.

    StrayCatFrump,

    You should probably find another Lemmy instance. That makes it easier to distance yourself from stuff like that when it happens.

    socsa,

    Lemmy deserves a better class of communist. And I’m going to give it to them.

    StrayCatFrump,

    Fair enough. Heh. Good luck with it!

    StrayCatFrump,

    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.

    nichtsowichtig,

    can you give me some context of that history? I’d like to read more about it

    StrayCatFrump, (edited )

    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.

    nichtsowichtig,

    thanks for the insight!

    StrayCatFrump,

    Sure thing. Edited to add a paragraph at the end about Raddit itself.

    masquenox, (edited )

    He was caught having whole conversation trees with himself in order to fake participation on the site and set its tone.

    Yep… I remember that - the little shit was masquerading as a “concerned anarchist” while using Stalinist tactics to harass their critics off the sub - and then started Raddle essentially to have an entire leftist forum for them to play overlord with.

    I abandoned r/anarchism pretty much at that time - arguing with right-wingers is a shit-ton easier than dealing with two-faced imposters like that.

    edit: For the record, I feel I have to add that it wasn’t actually this useless litle fucker’s activity that drove me off r/anarchism - it was my disappointment at the fact that the mods couldn’t spot their shitfuckery and come up with a way to deal with it when I’ve seen other mod teams manage it.

    o_0,

    this all checks out, I was never on r/anarchism but I’ve tried to go on raddle numerous times over the years, and every time i basically just leave in disgust because there’s so little nuance or good faith and if you aren’t completely down there their particular particular green-nihilist tendency you basically get treated like an enemy – not that I’m even against that tendency, but there’s many kinds of anarchism. And the mod(s? was it ever more than one person?) they were always having some public meltdown or being viciously attacked by people who they could have just banned ( or were they talking to themselves? ) It just always gives the place a spooky vibe, deep web forums are less paranoia inducing.

    masquenox,

    And the mod(s? was it ever more than one person?

    Quite honestly it’s difficult to tell whether it was all just an army of sock accounts or if this user (still going as ziq over on raddle) had actually managed to recruit some loyal followers into their weird little purity-testing cult or something. Either way, it’s pretty fucked up.

    But it did teach me an important lesson, though… any online space dedicated to leftists is going to inevitably attract these dangerous and toxic Napoleon-types (yes, I am naming them after the pig in Animal Farm - I’m going there) - people whose “leftism” only consists of that which facilitates their megalomania and who has the time and resources available to them to subvert those very spaces. It really explains why tankies have such a toxic presence online. Leftists should never fool themselves into assuming that someone understanding leftist theory automatically means they are acting in good faith.

    So I don’t get too heavily invested in leftist-only spaces - I prefer being out there engaging people and doing counter-propaganda. It just feels a whole lot more productive.

    MonkCanatella,

    Yeah I was banned from the sub with 0 explanation whatsoever. The mods for that sub suck

    krolden,
    @krolden@lemmy.ml avatar

    Love when they block you from messaging them.

    nix,
    @nix@merv.news avatar

    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

    In terms of anarchist communities on the fediverse all i know of is this anarchism /c/ kolektiva.social and the merveilles.town mastodon instance

    socsa,

    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.

    Swedneck,
    @Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

    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.

    Azzu,

    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.

    It’s just irrational blind hate because of political disagreement. Politics is the mind-killer.

    dingleberry,

    It’s ridiculous how many people completely dismiss something/someone just because of one thing.

    I read your whole comment and nodded in agreement…only to see the namedrop of Harry Potter Fanfic guy.

    Azzu,

    What do you mean by that?

    balls_expert,

    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.

    nichtsowichtig,

    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

    o_0,

    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

    Nyla_Smokeyface,

    What’s wrong with .ml?

    FarFarAway,

    Im taking a guess here. Maybe machine learning? Like AI?

    I never thought to even question it until this post.

    wasabi,

    ML in this context means Marxist/Leninist. The mali domain might also be a reference to that.

    nichtsowichtig,

    afaik the main reason for th domain is that Mali domains (.ml) have been free to get for some time. it neatly coincides with their marxist-leninist ideology so I guess that’s why they went for that domain

    FarFarAway,

    This makes more sense.

    Thanks!

    Nyla_Smokeyface,

    I mean .ml has existed for years, has it not? Not that AI stuff is new, it just got a surge in discussion and controversy. I don’t know what ml stands for though

    AnarchoYeasty,

    .ml is the top level domain for the country of Mali.

    TimewornTraveler,

    It stands for M😨arxist-L😱eninist, a political philosophy that endorses a strong state to act as vanguard for the communist revolution. Anarchists in contrast advocate for the dissolution of the political hierarchy that is the state.

    They like to fight on the internet a lot.

    socsa,

    There’s also an entire spectrum of left-lib in there as well.

    mojo,

    They’re redditors who choose to stay on the platform. Their opinion is invalid.

    MinusPi,

    Anarchism until it’s inconvenient

    nichtsowichtig,

    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

    elbarto777,

    In its* core.

    nichtsowichtig,

    thanks, corrected :)

    elbarto777,

    Glad to help!

    neonfire,

    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.

    nichtsowichtig,

    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

    elbarto777,

    Hm. I don’t know. If a serial kitten torturer amd killer made Foss software, I’d stay the fuck away.

    nichtsowichtig,

    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.

    elbarto777,

    You got a point - aa long as the infrastructure is a fork and not being currently maintained by the cat killer.

    CAPSLOCKFTW,
    @CAPSLOCKFTW@lemmy.ml avatar

    The developer of Reiser.fs, Hans Reiser killed his wife and currently is imprisoned as a convicted murderer

    The maintainer and developer of core-js served a 19-month prison sentence for killing two people in a traffic accident.

    zero_gravitas,

    Probably not fair to mention the core-js developer in the same context as Reiser. The way he explains it, he wasn’t at fault in that accident, and the Russian legal system is just messed up. His account here: github.com/…/2023-02-14-so-whats-next.md#accident

    CAPSLOCKFTW,
    @CAPSLOCKFTW@lemmy.ml avatar

    Yeah, it wasn’t my intention to put these two incidents on the same level. Judt wanted to share the two cases I know where Oprn Source devs actually killed people.

    atoll,

    ML?

    sotolf,
    @sotolf@programming.dev avatar

    Marxist Leninist, but I think the correct term would be tankie.

    nichtsowichtig,

    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

    elbarto777,

    Yes, the neutral term is marxist-lenilist.

    sotolf,
    @sotolf@programming.dev avatar

    I’m not sure why we should launder tankies and make everyone else that do like ML complicit with their fucked up ideas?

    elbarto777,

    Huh? If you call a serial killer a “knifey”, more power to you. But if I continue calling them serial killers and you retort with “I don’t think we should launder knifeys”, I will lol.

    sotolf,
    @sotolf@programming.dev avatar

    Why? tankies are Authocratic far left people, supporting dictators with bloody hands, I don’t think we need a neutral term, call them as it is, and I say this as a far left person, just not supporting authocrat dictators.

    elbarto777,

    Please go back to reddit.

    sotolf,
    @sotolf@programming.dev avatar

    I think someone felt attacked there :p good

    elbarto777,

    Nah brah. It’s just that the bullshit you wrote belongs to reddit. Go back to it.

    sotolf,
    @sotolf@programming.dev avatar

    All I wrote was a correct definition of a tankie. Stupid people worshipping the bloody handed dictators of russia and china.

    elbarto777,

    Oh. Okay.

    Drewfro66,
    @Drewfro66@lemmygrad.ml avatar

    Marxist-Leninist is the neutral term, though the current zeitgeist in “Tankie” spaces is “Just call yourself a Communist”. “Tankie” is a pejorative. It doesn’t mean anything more than “Socialist I don’t like”. I’ve heard some people call Anarchists Tankies if they have the bare minimum of ideologically consistent views like opposing Capitalist institutions such as the EU and NATO. Depending on what you mean by “Tankie”, yes, all MLs are Tankies.

    socsa,

    You can call them vanguardists, Bolsheviks, authoritarians, tankies, or just edgy teenagers.

    nichtsowichtig,

    out of these words I prefer vanguardists. bolsheviks feels weird because that term is used a lot by nazis, authoritarians doesn’t seem entirely accurate to me as marxists understand the authority of a revolutionary state as a necessary means to enable the transition to communism. I disagree with that, but don’t think it is the same as authoritarianism.

    socsa,

    How is it not authoritarianism? Basically every dictator in modern history has made some version of the exact same argument. We also have like 100 years of ML in practice now, so we know pretty well that there is not path beyond their “necessary dictatorship” phase.

    nichtsowichtig,

    I think that’s a really good point!

    psilocybin, (edited )

    Is it? You were completely right before, both in your assessment of the ML understanding of the necessity of a revolutionary state and in concluding that equating it with autoritarianism is not fair.

    Authoritarianism is understood by most people in a similar fashion to “wishing a benevolent dictator would rise and clean up”. Although some MLs might share that notion, an authoritatian revolutionary state doesn’t need to be led by a dictator, as you pointed out yourself.

    An "ism"s believes are defined by its scripture, famously Lenin devised what he called “democratic centralism” as decision making process. Ofc both in M and L it is concluded that authority is necessary but its still explicitly different from a dictator.

    With a different understanding of authoritarianism one could call the attribution to MLs somewhat correct albeit still defamatory (since people understand it differently). However socsa made his definition explicit by talking about dictators.

    So AFAIC his point “every dictator deemed his actions necessary” is not applicable to the conversation at hand especially when it is about how to correctly referr to MLs when it is at best a subset of authoritarianism.

    As far as his second point goes: Having doubts that ML will get past the dictatorship phase is legitimate, however employing history as an argument isn’t truthful. First and foremost: failed attempts of history are used by people to attest systemic failure to anarchism too, its just not a good argument. The 100 years too aren’t honest as no ML government has ever gotten that old (btw how long did it take for lib-dem systems to establish the truths they hold “self-evident”?)

    Then ofc there is a discussion to be had about how long an MLs countries dictatorship phase would need to be given attempts of foreign led coups and invasions and necessity to participate in global markets while protecting it from corruption by capital.

    All in all I find their attribution of the word “authoritarianism” for ML more fueled by contempt, less by reason.

    Nicht ganz unwichtig!

    psilocybin, (edited )

    I see these arguments more rooted in contempt, less in reason.

    Generally being doubtful of MLs ability to pass the dictatorship phase is valid though (if it refers to the rule of the party not one person)

    cecinestpasunbot,

    Calling someone a “tankie” is kind of similar to calling someone “woke”. It serves as an easy way to dismiss someone whose opinion you don’t like without actually engaging with their ideas. As such, I feel like the definition has been watered down with time.

    I got the sense a few years ago that the colloquial definition used online referred to people who unironically thought Stalin did nothing wrong. Most self described marxist-leninists don’t even fit into that category. As the scope grew people start using it to refer to basically any ML. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it’s been used to refer to anyone, Marxist or otherwise, who opposes US involvement in the war.

    dbilitated,
    @dbilitated@aussie.zone avatar

    ohhhhhhhhhhhh i wondered why there were a lot of .ml domains for lemmy

    nichtsowichtig,

    afaik Mali domains have been free to get for some time, but the letters make it very convenient for a marxist-leninist server

    LadyAutumn,
    @LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    Marxist Leninist.

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