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.
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.