So, with everything currently happening it’s pretty clear that as Marxist-Leninists and revolutionary socialists, we cannot continue to rely on big sites like Reddit to host our communities. I personally love what Lemmygrad is doing here, creating an alternative community that has almost the exact same style as the kind of site most of us are used to, i.e. Reddit. Not to mention the people trying to make communities on places on Matrix which operate similarly to Discord.
However I think all of this raises an even more important question: how willing are we, as a community, to try and “expand our horizons” beyond what we’re normally used to?
I say this because, as much as I love Lemmygrad and Matrix and other Reddit/Discord alternatives, they’re kinda suited more for fast-paced discussion and memes, and not necessarily for a lot of the more in-depth conversations that require more thinking and time to respond.
@Makan and I have been going back and forth about this, about trying to experiment with different styles of platforms for building a community more suited for deep, well thought-out discussions that aren’t as much of a free-for-all as places like these tend to be.
What do you comrades think? Am I over-thinking this, or should we truly work on “expanding our brand” a little bit?
we are not big enough to expand to other places in my opinion.
An important thing to note, is that lemmy has a sort called “New comments”, that can turn lemmy from a fast-paced news type thread, into a forum. IE comments on old posts will bump that post to the top.
That’s great to know, thank you :)
There have been a number of quite popular left-wing socialist forums over the years. In general, there have always been pretty active discussion groups any time a larger forum popped up - I remember yahoo politics having some lively debate as well as Myspace having a lot of communist groups - I wouldn’t be surprised if some were still active using that platform since it operated so far under the radar after facebook killed it. There were also the RevLeft forums, RedMarx, and a few other forums (mostly spawned off of RevLeft whenever the moderators there upset people). It was a useful tool for organizing I met a lot of great folks on the RevLeft forums and met a few IRL at different protests and other actions particularly around the time of OWS. This is a really interesting platform here, and I’m glad its getting some more attention now, and hopefully people like it enough to keep it alive.
What platforms did you all have in mind? Or are you implying with the 4th paragraph of creating our own platform?
We were thinking of trying to create platforms on places such as forum boards, or BBS systems
I think there’s totally room for some knowledge sharing from Hexbear in starting up the Lemmy. I’m not a mod there but I remember like taking away the downvote button was a good decision, and definitely some other things the community had to learn the hard way. There could definitely be some federated sister sites like this and Hexbear that start to form a cool tapestry of communities
