something something specter something Lemmyverse 
this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2024
166 points (96.6% liked)
the_dunk_tank
15928 readers
2 users here now
It's the dunk tank.
This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes.
Rule 1: All posts must include links to the subject matter, and no identifying information should be redacted.
Rule 2: If your source is a reactionary website, please use archive.is instead of linking directly.
Rule 3: No sectarianism.
Rule 4: TERF/SWERFs Not Welcome
Rule 5: No ableism of any kind (that includes stuff like libt*rd)
Rule 6: Do not post fellow hexbears.
Rule 7: Do not individually target other instances' admins or moderators.
Rule 8: The subject of a post cannot be low hanging fruit, that is comments/posts made by a private person that have low amount of upvotes/likes/views. Comments/Posts made on other instances that are accessible from hexbear are an exception to this. Posts that do not meet this requirement can be posted to !shitreactionariessay@lemmygrad.ml
Rule 9: if you post ironic rage bait im going to make a personal visit to your house to make sure you never make this mistake again
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
lemmygrad is the DPRK and we are Cuba if you think about it
Lemmy.ml could be considered China since it's too important to defederate
And also conceded too much ground to libs.
This is true because every lib/fash debate-lord they send in here to rhetorically destroy us ends up fucking me. They deny it later, but it's true.
I think it's the reverse, since Hexbear is both more revisionist and more militant than grad, relative to these being instances
lemmygrad is the socialist nation of federation, already embargo'd by almost every other instance just for being based
History lesson!
Midwest blocked lemmygrad probably three years ago, long before hexbear had federation at all. I'm kind of surprised it's still blocked, but the admins probably see unblocking it as kicking a hornets nest, it would definitely turn into a discussion about hexbear as well.
I understand why they blocked it, there's some history there.
Lemmygrad was the second lemmy instance, started as communism.lemmy.ml, I think there were a bunch of other instances already by the time they moved to the lemmygrad domain. I'm pretty sure midwest started early enough that they predate the move to lemmygrad, I think they're old enough that they were set up even before chapo.chat (now hexbear). I was never on the cth subreddit, but I was already on communism lemmy/lemmygrad before the sub was banned, and I found out about this site when it started from being on lemmy. I actually liked communism lemmy a good bit better than chapo.chat for a while. The community was awesome, I visited daily, I learned a lot of shit and it really shaped my current worldview in a lot of ways. Chapo.chat had more shitposting but there was honestly a good bit more infighting than there is today and I found that somewhat tiring.
When genzedong got banned from reddit, a ton of their users fled to lemmygrad (already on their own domain at this point). It became a different community and the toxicity just went through the roof overnight. I hated it. The federated lemmy instances (chapo.chat was not) stopped coexisting without drama (edit: not totally accurate, wolfballs did not coexist peacefully with any of the others, rest in piss) and a lot of instances started having discussion after discussion about defederating from lemmygrad. Any defederation from lemmygrad but not from hexbear was almost certainly a reaction to that.
I started using lemmygrad less and less and started using my hexbear (I think? Maybe chapo.chat still back then) account much more. I think by that point the culture here had settled in more with less infighting than there had been at the start.
There was one extremely prolific poster that arrived at lemmygrad after the genzedong ban that was just arguing with fucking everyone on so many posts on every federated instance and it really grated on me that the lemmygrad community was rallying around her all the time. I saw her name join hexbear a couple years back and blocked immediately. I looked a couple months ago (blocklists came up in a thread and I looked and that was the only account on mine) and apparently she was banned from hexbear after only nine months of using hexbear with like 5000 comments or something just completely absurd.
Maybe midwest sucks now I don't really know, but they were cool with lemmygrad up until it went through its hostility phase. The lemmygrad culture has changed since then, but pre-genzedong ban lemmygrad was probably my favorite online community I've been a part of, so I'm still a little sad about the whole thing.
Because it's not the same as suddenly introducing a radical change to the way your community behaves as a whole. Even though the instances somewhat had their own cultures, the federation was really tight-knit at the time and the overarching feel was more or less not combatative in any way shape or form (with obvious exceptions for new users who are about to be banned for the shit they're spewing). When one user joins and they start a lot of arguments with genuine anger, it's really easy to not engage if that's how your community already is. That person will assimilate or figure out that they don't belong. But when they join with an assortment of others to back them up each confrontation, it's harder to keep the same coherence.
Totally disagree on this point. You're right that it wouldn't make sense if that were true.
A .ml account. I did have an account on communism.lemmy.ml too, but I basically only used it pre-federation and when the federation was having issues. Once the federation was reliable I was browsing lemmygrad through .ml entirely.
I'm having a lot of trouble parsing what you're saying here, to the point where I'm wondering if we were talking in different directions earlier in this thread without realizing it.
I'm pretty sure the genzedong ban I'm talking about was around late 2021/early 2022 timeframe, so that had made its mark on the lemmy culture well before the time you had joined.
The federation issues I'm talking about were the inevitable issues going from federation not existing to testing it out for the very first time. Lemmy in 2020 and maybe up to early 2021 was disjoint sites with no federation at all working yet. Not 100% that I've got accurate time for federation beginning (or anything else really), estimating based on getting my account mid 2020 but I know I was lurking for a good while before. I'm generally not enthusiastic registering new accounts anywhere, and no big issues with lurking, so while it might have only been a few months I was lurking, it could have been as much as over a full year before I actually got an account to participate myself.
I think you're really underselling the "wasn't as calm" point here.
Yeah, the last line is essentially what I was trying to say about underselling the impact of starting points. Just looking at outcomes the scale makes you think the second should be more drastic, but when you also consider the context of what the community was beforehand it's factor of eighty vs a factor of four.