Share everywhere, let’s begin building a new way to use the internet
Fantastic article! I already agree with federated, explicitly leftist spaces as our base, but one thing I see under-mentioned is the necessity of engaging with reactionary-controlled spaces to agitate and bring people over to our spaces. We need to be on Reddit to bring people to Lemmy. We need to be on Lemmy.ml to bring people from Lemmy.world and the like to places like Lemmygrad.ml and Hexbear.net. We need to be on Twitter to bring people to Mastadon.
One thing I really think is helpful is agitating not just on Reddit, for example, but on Lemmy.ml in areas where radicalized liberals can see it. It’s why I host my intro ML reading list there, and do all of my agitation there. I have recieved DMs from users thanking me for continuously pushing the ML perspective and helping change their minds, so I know it works.
At the same time, the areas we control, such as Lemmygrad.ml, need to be developed spaces that are easy to transition people to. Introductory reading guides, helpful FAQs, and more are already great exampled we do. We need to continue fostering our communities here so that we have spaces to bring people.
All in all, excellent article, well done comrade!
I fully agree and I’d love your involvement with the work we’re doing in this. I don’t know if you saw the Redline Media invite link at the bottom of the piece but that is where we’re working from temporarily until we move to self-hosted servers. We need as many people involved in this project as much as possible.
I’ll have to think about it! I’m extremely busy lately, and have recently begun org work IRL on top of that, so my hands are pretty full at the moment, but I’ll keep it in mind!
Very true, those with the patience and tolerance for Reddit absolutely have a duty to guide comrades here.
Yea, been thinking about doing it recently.
commenting to boost/bump + so i can find this post more easily later (saved as well of course)
this has been a long time coming for sure. this is a tad dramatic to say but watching the internet i grew up with being dragged around as a rotted, empty beaten-dead-horse-corpse is very upsetting and disturbing. but I need to find it in me to work hard and turn that emotion into the fuel needed to collect and (re)distribute resources
I’ve been saying this for a long time as well. All the tools are available for us. We have a few issues I think:
- Networking
- Administration
- Ease of access
Networking
We need to built a network (read webring or similar) of leftist sites. We need to take a Popular Front approach to this work. Connecting groups via our shared core goals regardless of our ideological differences. This way, that list of shared sites is more easily and readily accessible. Remember, Google Search isn’t going to turn up these sites on a query most of the time. So building a network of sites is key to discovery. This could also work as a kind of federation group.
Administration
We need to foster a cadre of technical minded comrades as well as community minded comrades to build these sites. This is a dual issue that needs to be worked out in unison, because these sites need to be stable. Not just in terms of uptime but also in its community. A site which is wither up and down often, or unmoderated and full of wreckers does us nothing and will make this task more difficult for everyone. We have a dedicated person on the team at Hexbear maintaining our UI fork for example. Its unclear of we have a backup plan for a “hit by a bus” scenario here. So we must ensure open communication with the wider administrative community but also find ways to educate and train more like minded technical comrades and community builders. Likewise we need to be involved as much as we can in contributing to projects to ensure they suite our needs and to ensure their continued development.
Ease of Access
Lastly, we should be collecting and collaborating together on how to make the setup and management of these sites as easy as we can for future operators. Hosting things like Lemmy, Matrix, Mastodon, etc, is no simple task at times. This goes hand in hand with Administration. Part of being a good administrator is having good documentation. Many of these services have decent documentation, but it could be better. So as part of ensuring ease of access we should be collecting:
- guides on configuring popular services.
- docker configurations for easy spin up.
- write-ups on various services to run, their maintenance complexity, and ease of administration.
- an authoritative list of queer/leftist software to investigate.
We should also be evaluating the underlying tech stack as well and providing guidance on things like: what hosting sites to use, What domain registrars to use, How to host out of your house, etc.
If we want this network to grow; if we want it to be the safe harbor for users who will be driven off mainstream social media, we have to make that process easier for people. With the_deprogram kicked off reddit, I wonder if they would have taken the option of building their own site if we had materials ready to ease them into that process.
Everything you said I fully agree with and it’s why, as someone deeply studied and experienced in social media and various IT issues, me and my comrades are building what we are building. I have my think tank which deals with a lot of these issues, and then my comrade has our IT agency for teaching on the issues of cyber security, websites, etc. Both of our organizations will bleed over to each other at times but that was the intended purpose.
A piece I posted back in April, which is something I’ve been discussing with them for a year or two now, is “the biggest weak points in the Left” and it goes over some of this. It’s why we are building as much as we can and inviting as many into it as we can because we need to solve these issues. https://islamicsocialist.substack.com/p/the-biggest-weak-points-of-the-us
Networking
We definitely need to go with the old internet way of websites linking to other websites their authors like. I’ve been thinking for a while that it would be nice if Lemmygrad/hexbear, tankietube and matapacosdog all linked to each-other in places where everyone can see them. We should also link across languages whenever possible and link to similar communities in Spanish, Russian, Chinese or whichever else.
Also, we’re really under-utilizing the fediverse’s capability to have users and contents from completely different software interact directly with each-other.
We should also try to form a base of dedicated content creators who would create content specifically or at least primarily for our spaces, artists to post art, pictures and creative writing of lemmygrad, hexbear and matapacos, musicians and videasts to post music and videos on tankietube.
Even a simple webring might be a step up from what we’re doing now. I’m sure we could get the admins of each site to at least put some links into the sidebar. A webring though, that’s retro and cool!
I have nothing useful to add to these ideas but I just want to say yeah a webring would be cool and fun.
These are sick, and that marxism.org one is really tickling me for some reason. You just had these on deck? Also, what kind of dope name would our webring have?
You just had these on deck?
I’m a collector of old(-looking) commie/lefty websites and graphics 🫡
Also, what kind of dope name would our webring have?
I like “The People’s Web(ring)” and “USSWR, The United Socialist Sites Webring” mentioned below
I feel the People’s Web could be a way to refer to the concept of the commie side of the indie/alt/personal/non-corporate/etc. web in general and USSWR for the webring :)
I’m a collector of old(-looking) commie/lefty websites and graphics 🫡
ngl I’m gonna steal some of those.
She hammer and sickle and Stalin star trek ship goes so hard.
I’m a collector of old(-looking) commie/lefty websites and graphics.
Is there a way for me to see your collection 👀.
I like “The People’s Web(ring)” and “USSWR, The United Socialist Sites Webring” mentioned below
I feel the People’s Web could be a way to refer to the concept of the commie side of the indie/alt/personal/non-corporate/etc. web in general and USSWR for the webring :)
I floated the idea of “The Peoples Network” a while back in another post, and then I found out that chuds have captured that name. It’s also apparently the name of a multilevel marketing company.
I do like the sound of “The People’s Web” as a subsection of the Indie/alt web movement, though. I did manage to acquire the domain abolish.capital which I’m just itching to use as more than just a whole ass copy of the manifesto.
it’s to bad .web tld are not a thing (yet). I feel like I’d need to grab a good thepeoplesweb.tld. I could probably get www[.]peopleswebr[.]ing.
The RedRing? The week when decades happen? Workers of the world united? The bunker? The people’s web? The deeply serious communists? Karl’s chill corner?
The Popular Front For Liberation and Socialism Webring, or PFLSWR if you’re nasty. WWWW, Workers World Wide Webring. USSWR, The United Socialist Sites Webring. Cominterwebring, or the Communist International Webring. PLWR, The Peoples Liberation Webring. The Abolish Capital Webring (apparently abolish[.]capital is an available domain name).
apparently abolish[.]capital is an available domain name
I vote for abolishing its availability by taking it.
i mean, this has lots of sense…that’s why i left most of my accounts on traditional websites. now i’m in mastodon and lemmygrad, and i use linux and most free software that i can
I use both. I use Linux, element, and signal for my computer, communications and planning with the comrades, and the popular social media’s specifically for propaganda and reaching out to comrades to bring into the organizations our group is building.
That has been my position for a while: that we should settle our main accounts and activities on independent social media particularly the fediverse and use main-stream social medias as a way to reach out for more peoples.
I also think we should adjust our communication: debunking the propaganda about AES and historical communist theorists and leaders is good, but we do it so much that we barely talk about Marxist economic theory and philosophy. When trying to win over peoples in the process of getting radicalized, we should first talk about things like how the bourgeoisie is stealing the worker’s surplus value and how that fact plus the competition and need for perpetual growth inevitably lead capitalism to fail, the rehabilitation of Stalin and Mao has to come after.
I have been saying this for a while and it’s why I made Redline Media Institute. I’m not going to just wait for the Left to come around, I’m going to help build.
We need a wide range of different propaganda for different purposes. Our group has guides on social media strategy, psychological warfare, and memetic warfare.
We have and need more propaganda centered on left-wing communities - defending AES, talking about Marxist economics and philosophy, theory, etc.
We need propaganda for the progressives to move them left - micro-dosing ideology, challenging liberal notions, etc.
We need propaganda to influence normies to the left, usually a combination of the previous two but in smaller micro-doses and said as a passing piece in content that isn’t even political.
Like I said “What makes a pipeline a pipeline is the many entry points into it that leads to specific political communities.” We need to pull in people from anywhere.
I agree. That’s basically how I and other leftists came in to the fold. First is some Sanders-style Democratic Socialism which mostly focuses on the problems of capitalism and raising class consciousness, then came the study of how these problems are part of capitalism’s innate quality, then socialism could fix these problems, but then you run into the old propaganda against it (it sounds good, but it would never woke in theory, every state it’s tried hasn’t worked, etc). That’s when you can focus on raising the consequences of imperialism and the good parts of those old states.
A lot of people are stuck between those first couple steps, knowing there’s an issue with today’s society and hating billionaires, but aren’t ready to believe socialism can fix it because they have been trained to reflexively hate it. Many also don’t believe these problems are intrinsic to capitalism, that it can still be saved, that our current period is an aberration of capitalism, and not inevitable for the system, and such. The nice period of the boom cycles, like the 50’s or the 90’s of their youth, are clearly the normal part of capitalism and the bust cycles are just the result of mismanagement. From this average frame of understanding coming from a lifetime of being raised in propaganda, you need to start with pretty base theory, not advanced stuff like navigating the complex legacies of Stalin or Mao, or even the Russia-Ukraine war (imo).
Not only that but we need to relate to the people’s immediate material concerns, that’s when our propaganda is at its strongest and liberal propaganda at its weakest. We need to remember that the strength of Marxism is that it can explain why things are so bad like no other ideology can.
Liberal economics is little more than gaslighting and lionizing that attempt to shift blame on the average person and pretend that the system isn’t broken, only mismanaged, meanwhile fascism is the laziest of victim blaming imaginable and such an ideological void that they have to tokenize leftist terminology to trick peoples into getting on board, only Marxism has an analysis of capitalism that makes sense with the average worker’s lived experience.
-Non-Federated, Left-Wing Sites
- TankieTube, Communist YouTube
Thanks for the mention!
TankieTube is a PeerTube instance, so it belongs in the federated column IMO (albeit its current network is small).
Oh that’s awesome! I didn’t know that. You the one who made it?
Yessir
That’s awesome, thank you for it being made, we needed our own space for video content.
While I mostly agree with everyone you say, I still believe one has to meet the masses where they are found, and increasingly among younger people, this is on mainstream social media sites, so a little bit of both.
I never said not to use popular social medias, but to use them specifically for the purpose of spreading ideology. The sites like this one where we aren’t censored or as censored need to be spaces of planning, discussion and getting propaganda. Then we should go to popular socials specifically to spread these beliefs and propaganda into communities outside our own echo chambers.
“You need to see every corner of the internet as a city to influence and people to bring towards the movement as best as possible. That’s our biggest weak point in the Left in terms of influence, the lack of mass mobilization and spread of influence.”
Too many braindead antimaterialists who think that their ideas or conscientiouses create reality.
True but if you look at the careers of every successful revolutionary they did tons of reading, writing, and getting the word out. Don’t discount theory, communication and networking. That’s not idealism, that’s putting ideas into action.
Facts, this was exactly what I did after I studied theory and got self-activated to organize with the organizations I belonged to.
though we might have to figure out how to get around censorship and surveillance in these corporate platforms if we want to keep using them.
Which can only really happen with a primary space sharing tips and tactics to do so without as much or any censorship. That’s why I made Redline Media Institute. And for the rest of the Left who doesn’t make content, that’s what spaces like this one and the others is for. A place to speak freely and plan and then know how to carry ourselves on the corporate sites as we spread influence.
