For those who don’t know, Reddit announced they would start asking outrageous prices for API access, which will essentially kill off all third party apps.
We’ve received quite a few new account requests after this announcement, and expect to receive more, so this post is aimed at you, prospective lemmygrad member!
We’ll go through each account application with due diligence, but we would like you to know before you request an account that Lemmygrad is a Marxist instance, principally Marxist-Leninist. We like Stalin and we uphold the DPRK’s sovereignty and legitimacy over the whole of Korea. We love China’s Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.
You can always request an account but you will likely be disappointed in your browsing experience if we approve you and you find yourself surrounded by MLs if you are not one.
Up to a few seconds ago, our tagline said “leftist communities” instead of “marxist communities” on join-lemmy, and I’m guessing that’s why many non-marxist socialists wanted to join us.
You might prefer lemmy.ml or hexbear.net, although hexbear is not federated with anyone yet.
“So what is Marxism? Do I fit in here?”
It is ok if you are not a 10th degree grand master of Marxonomics, all you have to have to be welcome here is respect for the community and a willingness to learn. We will teach you.
Marxism is highly complex however the basic concept of it is:
Capitalism is fundamentally flawed, isn’t reformable, and requires a working class revolution to solve the constant revolving crisis’ of capitalism.
If you agree with the above statement you belong here.
Marxism takes a scientific and pragmatic approach towards solving this issue (organize, educate, agitate) as opposed to an idealistic one (we’ll just do a revolution and everything will be fixed!).
Welcome all new leftists! As per always, it is best to study works of our most successful comrades (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao) and their works can be found at Marxists.org for free.
For comrades already here, I wasn’t sure how to go about this sort of welcome post as I’m not entirely sure what to expect/who will be incoming, so I tried to cast a wide net.
That’s absolutely ok, as long as someone isn’t freaking out on the mere sound of “marxism” it’s already good sign.
Lol if they can’t handle us they sure as shit can’t handle Hexbear. I love me some Hexbear but we are tame in comparison. I feel like people can have decently calm and reasonable arguments and discussions over here. On Hexbear things can get pretty heated pretty fast. The memes and shit posting is too notch though. No one dunks on libs better and no one is more ready to go harass some chuds on reddit.
Yeah pretty much lol, but hex is more left unity and we’re (mostly) strictly marxist, specifically ML. We let in people if their answers are good but centrists or pure libertarians like the couple we’ve had would definitely prefer other instances altogether.
Yeah, I did two identical discussion posts about the LTV on Lemmygrad and Hexbear, and the results were very interesting. I had four or so comments here on Lemmy that were basically discussing and having a civil debate over how people in sales and advertising do or do not create value, and some talk about art. On Hexbear though, I just got a few people giving brief, badly summarized explanations of the labor theory of value and basically just said “maybe” and “IDK” to my inquiries, which isn’t really helpful because I was wanting more discussion, and I obviously already know the LTV.
This isn’t conclusive or anything, but yeah, my example definitely highlights a difference in the userbase and communication of the different communities.
I just checked out that thread you made here, and that’s some amazing content. I’ve literally been here for a day and I’m already dreading a potential drop in the quality of our discussions. Fingers crossed we continue to contribute and expect such quality.
I was curious to see the Hexbear responses as well, and as they aren’t federated yet, would you mind sharing a link here, please?
Sure. Here is my identical post on Hexbear.
The “discussion” that takes place is ambiguous at best, however, it didn’t get too many views. It seems theory-type posts like that wouldn’t do so well. (Again, most likely because of differing attitudes and communities)
deleted by creator
I am debating making a hexbear account, im just not sure how they enforce the left unity thing
I encourage you to see for yourself. It’s hard to explain.
Thus far I have held my tongue on HexBear as I have had very limited exposure to the site’s content. But since it seems to not be a mischaracterization I will say when I have looked on there it seems quite immature.
Honestly I have no clue what API access is and I don’t want to know but an new influx of users is fun to see
API is a way for software to communicate with each other, basically a format for sharing data. 3rd party reddit apps ask reddit for information about posts through the API and then format that information for users. Reddit wants to charge the apps for doing this now, which isn’t unusual, but the pricing is ridiculous considering most reddit apps are developed by individual devs, who absolutely cannot afford it (20+ million USD per year!!!). Reddit wants people to use their official app so advertisement revenue goes to them and not developers of superior 3rd party apps.
By experience, most internet users who self-identified as Communists and oppose Stalin tend to be either brainwashed people in countries that are under the rule of Westen European diaspora or trolling bots. Is there any real Communists who actually oppose Stalin? Stalin receive the most slander in Western European diaspora because he refused the destruction of USSR through an unsustainable war against Fascism and he forced the desolution of alliance by British and French empires with Hitler’s Nazi Germany. The Liberals complained about the non-agreession pact between Stalin and Hitler, even when the Western European empires forced Stalin to make the peace pact, that buy time for war preparation by USSR against Hitler at a time when USSR is too underindustrialized and too devasted from the Russian civial war that was more damaging than World War 1.
I’ve found that there are a surprising amount of Marxist academics who are leftcoms or Khrushchevites or related. Even from nonwestern ones, in Karl Marx’s ecosocialism Kohei Saito randomly disses “Stalinism” a few times and he’s from Japan. I’m currently reading the Dialectical Biologist and it also randomly denounces Stalin despite being otherwise good. The authors of that book are from India.
Academics are rarely anything but pets of the bourgeoisie so of course they must adopt non-threatening tendencies if they’re open about it. The number of (open) Parenti’s was never going to be more than you could count on a few fingers. Not to say there aren’t many sincere, principled ML’s in academia, they just don’t write about it or hide it.
Something about the ivory tower and the desire for respectability also bullies these people into accepting the (CIA) consensus so of course it’s unacceptable to go against historians, writers, people in other disciplines who allege atrocities. Of course it’s impossible for them to give the middle finger to ‘academics’ from Poland, etc who sob about the oppression of the Soviet Union. They cling to a false respectability instead, one of either reform (revisionism) or similar. Arrive at similar thoughts to their liberal peers through other means and are thus accepted.
DPR Korea isn’t sovereign over the whole of Korea.
Not yet, anyway. Hopefully soon.
i’m pretty sure it’s two clauses; lemmygrad upholds the DPRK’s sovereignty and upholds its legitimacy over the whole of korea.
Ths is how I understood when I read it too. But I can see how original commenter got their interpretation, since it’s kinda worded that way.
I believe legitimacy is the better term, they are the legitimate government of the whole of Korea.
You can always request an account but you will likely be disappointed in your browsing experience if we approve you and you find yourself surrounded by MLs.
Would it be better to say:
You can always request an account but you may be disappointed in your browsing experience if we approve you and you did not expect to find yourself surrounded by MLs.
We’re a friendly bunch. Many non-MLs will enjoy it here; so long as they know in advance that anti-ML slander and propaganda / liberal tendencies will be challenged and could lead to a ban.
We’ve had non-socialists (but left-leaning) people requesting accounts :P
In this case I doubt they will stick around after they hear Stalin did nothing wrong haha
I get that, but the current wording makes it sound like people in general aren’t necessarily welcome here. The way I read it first, I thought it made it sound that even new MLs, ‘will likely be disappointed’. I think the intended message is clear from the context and from knowing what Lemmygrad is like, but newcomers might not see that.
This is a welcoming place. It’s liberal and liberal adjacent views that will be challenged and which could result in bans.
I also think that liberals are susceptible to Marxism Leninism when they are in a space where it’s promoted and not ridiculed. Those who aren’t, won’t stick around for long because they’ll leave or be banned. But those who stay because they see us arguing for e.g. a better quality of life and against e.g. war and wage theft, will be radicalised. For these reasons, I’d alter the framing of the message to make us seem as friendly, etc, as we are.
I reworded a bit to clarify that marxists should request an account here.
We’ve always been a Marxist community, and probably 99% of users on lemmygrad are ML. We do approve accounts sometimes that are not ML or marxist if their answers are good, but we usually let them in piecemeal.
And that’s the reason we as a community have generally been chill with learners :P we’re able to retain this ML core and not get disturbed by too many centrists or liberals spouting anti-communism. The message itself should be taken to mean if you’re not a Marxist, you might prefer other instances instead of arguing with marxist-leninists about Stalin.
The point is indeed to discourage people that wouldn’t fit (i.e. get banned after a day or two) from requesting accounts though, as we expected having several dozen new requests to go through. For the data hobbyists, it seems to have worked as we stopped getting centrists and libertarians and I definitely noticed a reduction in daily account requests from before the announcement went up.
Good work, comrade. It’s a tricky balance and we’ve seen before how a small clique can become a big voice.
You’d be surprised, I stuck around on GZD back when i discovered the sub on reddit for the first time
It should not allow Maoists at all.
Do we have any word on the progress/ continued intent for hexbear to federate?
Main (current) hexbear dev here. We are all wrapped up getting hexbear back on top of upstream lemmy. All our features are merged in, and we are now preparing for our migration. We don’t have concrete plans yet for federation itself that I’m aware of, and will likely be up to the community.
Haven’t y’all federated now? How do I subscribe to hexbear communities on my home instance (here)?
Last I heard they were looking at volunteers to help with the backend, it’s a whole thing and it’s going to require manpower. Otherwise I don’t know where they’re at, haven’t heard anything in a month or two.
Isn’t one of the biggest issues the emotes?
Emotes would have to go unless they can contribute the code necessary to support custom emotes to Lemmy. But hexbear has diverged so much from the Lemmy codebase that it’s not as simple as copying and pasting the code, they’re gonna have to rewrite the website from the ground up essentially. As well as contribute to Lemmy to get what they need out of it.
yes didn’t mean to imply it was that simple, I just remember them saying emotes were going to be one of the biggest problems or something
Emotes (as well as taglines) are on the development branch. This is what I see in the admin settings running the latest changes from Lemmy’s main branch locally:
I have no idea when the next stable release with all of the latest changes will be, but if I had to guess I’d think it wouldn’t be long after the websocket API is ripped out.
I hope we get BIG EMOJIS.
Before hexbear I always hated emojis because they all look like corporate ad art eww.
But BIG COMMUNIST EMOJIS are cool and I can see what they are depicting because they are BIG.
Small correction. Reddit has not announced their API costs publicly. The news stems from the dev of an third party Reddit client (Apollo) sharing what he discussed with Reddit representatives on a private phone call. But their is no reason to not believe that Reddit will try to price out third party clients to be able to mould the user experience to their will.
the thing that was funny about it is that Apollo would need to pay TWENTY MILLION DOLLARS a year on average to cover for all the API requests it needs.
Reddit will go forward with this, it will go public and they know that their biggest selling point is user data. Which isn’t worth a lot if third parties can access it for free anyway.
