Congrats, /r/GenZedong refugees. You’re officially participating in the dual power of the online left. If you aren’t a regular here already or you weren’t around for the banning of /r/ChapoTrapHouse as well as its hundreds of offshoot subs, please understand something. When that ban happened, Lemmy was very usable and pleasantly snappy, but it was also in its infancy in terms of moderation tooling and federation. Its flagship instance, while full of pleasant and informative people, still didn’t have nearly the amount of activity that it does today. If you want to point at something which is very specific to this moment in history, the disruption of corporate social media is here and Lemmy’s participation is not insignificant.
Social media companies have enclosed the internet’s traditional cyberspaces for at least a decade, if not several. The internet, at its best, has always been a place for communities of practice to educate newcomers and old timers alike. And that process has produced countless hours of free labor for an ever-increasing fraction of humanity to enjoy. This is the commons that modern tech companies have enclosed: our ability to collaborate fluidly and freely with peers and without monetary compensation. And we’re taking it back slowly but surely.
As communists we don’t have the ability to throw dead labor at a community and boost its growth by an order of magnitude overnight. Lucky for us, the capitalists keep doing it for us by quarantining and banning any sub which is sufficiently popular and insufficiently liberal. We all know shitposting is great for agitation and even sometimes for education. How to leverage these online spaces for impactful organizing is an open question that I would love to see a solution to in the next couple years. The sooner the better. We’re going to need it.
Congrats, /r/GenZedong refugees. You’re officially participating in the dual power of the online left. If you aren’t a regular here already or you weren’t around for the banning of /r/ChapoTrapHouse as well as its hundreds of offshoot subs, please understand something. When that ban happened, Lemmy was very usable and pleasantly snappy, but it was also in its infancy in terms of moderation tooling and federation. Its flagship instance, while full of pleasant and informative people, still didn’t have nearly the amount of activity that it does today. If you want to point at something which is very specific to this moment in history, the disruption of corporate social media is here and Lemmy’s participation is not insignificant.
Social media companies have enclosed the internet’s traditional cyberspaces for at least a decade, if not several. The internet, at its best, has always been a place for communities of practice to educate newcomers and old timers alike. And that process has produced countless hours of free labor for an ever-increasing fraction of humanity to enjoy. This is the commons that modern tech companies have enclosed: our ability to collaborate fluidly and freely with peers and without monetary compensation. And we’re taking it back slowly but surely.
As communists we don’t have the ability to throw dead labor at a community and boost its growth by an order of magnitude overnight. Lucky for us, the capitalists keep doing it for us by quarantining and banning any sub which is sufficiently popular and insufficiently liberal. We all know shitposting is great for agitation and even sometimes for education. How to leverage these online spaces for impactful organizing is an open question that I would love to see a solution to in the next couple years. The sooner the better. We’re going to need it.