When things get extreme they get similar.
'Extreme' is a vague word, but when you're talking about communism and fascism (or more generally 'far-left' and 'far-right' ideology), that's a false generalization known as 'horseshoe theory'.
There are many clear counter-examples when talking about communism, like the entire school of anacho-communist ideologies and the existing societies stemming from them (including the Zapatista territory in Mexico with a population of around 360,000, or the FEJUVE federation in Bolivia, or the many anarchist communes around the world).
As for the more authoritarian versions (Stalinist, Maoist and related ideologies), despite their strong one-party systems, they are still extremely different to fascist ideologies in their goals and how they use their strong state to achieve them. To say 'they are the same in many respects' would apply just as equally to liberal capitalist states like the USA and allies, with their infamously militarized police, constant wars and imperial militarism, strong cult of nationalism (for the US, it's centered on the Founding Fathers), mass imprisonment and state interference in bodily autonomy.
If the citizens weren’t tacitly benefiting, in any way from the resource extraction of the bourgeoisie, maybe you’d have a point there; but since they do, you don’t
Someone tacitly benefiting from a state's imperialism doesn't stop them simultaneously being victims of the absolute horror that is capitalism. That's a big part of why even in the most exploitative regimes there are millions of anti-capitalists who engage in international solidarity. The capitalist class like to pretend there's some national unity at play when they screw over the proletariat, but it's all clearly bullshit.
Just fuck off if you’re gonna go to bat for a settler before you waste any more of both of our time.
I don't bat for settlers. I'm publicly replying to your public reply, because it was sectarian in a way which is harmful to the international socialist movement. If you think this conversation is wasting your time, then just ignore it.
Nice resource, thanks for finding it for us!
There was a similar investigation in... I want to say Australia and their current major neo-Nazi org. An undercover infiltrator was able to film an older member admitting to being a higher-up manager in a casino earning six-figures and discriminating against employees based on race. Afterwards they got fired. You can also find various antifascist blogs where they publish dox of neo-Nazis and often you see them getting fired as a result.
Remember: this causes real, material damage to their operations. Some try to buy rural property to use for training or buy places to use as 'active clubs', some will use hire cars/trucks and some will want to fund core members to be full-time activists, so taking away their income makes this all harder.
Cool slogan, but that is an extremely tough thing to do in any capitalist state, let alone the USA.
As long as workers are armed, the state will demand the cops are armed tenfold. And what solution is there except organizing enough to actually threaten the state? This is actually that tough.
If I remember correctly, the admin (a US Lolbertarian) finally closed it down, among other reasons, when they realized the resident nazis there were not just joking to troll da libs and actually believed the things they were saying about 'jewish shapeshifters'. They wanted a free speech haven, and so they got the people we collectively told to shut up.
Why would it? It seems like it would just be similar to the circlejerk forums they've have for decades, alienated from the mainstream and unable to normalize their ideas and recruit so easily.
It sounds as if you're using the atrocities of the French bourgeoisie as a way to excuse nationalist bigotry against a people. The French state is imperialist and colonist, the French citizens are mostly victims of capitalism, not the settlers.
Obviously it's a different situation with French people overseas, but we're not in that context.
They hide their faces because antifascists put in the effort to let the community know who they are. Many a fascist has lost a six-figure job or been kicked out of home, so they're scared alright.
I don't know about this group specifically ('Blood Tribe') although most neo-Nazi orgs have one or a few leaders, perhaps ex-military, but are primarily recruiting nerdy alienated teens who spend most of their time online. There are leaked Patriot Front training videos and if you haven't already seen their Philadelphia march, they did crumble like a burnt cookie when the community came out and started punching them back into their U-Haul vans.
Not sure how it would go with guns, but I have little faith in them fighting off more than just spraying a few bullets into a crowd.
should
Well, who is going to do it? (if you aren't already, get organized!)
I don’t understand why they have no fear of this at all.
Most people don't want to go to prison or be shot. Even in WWI there were many trenches who organically decided not to shoot each other. So the odds that someone would just open fire are small, even if real. That's also why armed antifascists are also comfortable enough to provide defense at marches and events.
It's a tough two-sided situation, because open-carry laws were what allowed the Black Panthers to defend people against police.
This time, the problem isn't the guns but that Nazis are there and comfortable enough to get together and hold them. If there were no guns, it would still be a problem, they just make it worse.
I don’t believe that fascism can be defined as an ideology, because fascists aren’t ideologically coherent.
It very clearly can't be one coherent ideology, just like liberalism isn't, just like communism isn't. I'm definitely not trying to claim even those individual types (e.g. Italian Fascism, Nazism) are consistent, internally logical, or any of that. Rather, there are common themes, ideas and features which group them together and distinguish them from other ideologies. These groups form a model of relationships between values, ideas and behaviors.
The reason I bring historical circumstance into this is because this model acknowledges attributes like militarism and class collaboration as core components of fascism, with the implied question: why did militarism and class collaborationism take hold in some cases (where a fascist regime rose) and not in others (where it fizzles or is defeated)? Historical factors like World War I and the subsequent wave of communist uprisings are related to why fascist ideologies were developed and were supported by many ex-military and bourgeois. And that is why the conservative racist chauvinism in the neoliberal US and Europe is taking remarkably different shapes to the fascist movements of the 1920s, despite those similarities which guide your definition all being present.
An example of this is neo-Nazi movements like Patriot Front and their international equivalents, which do not receive the blessing of the owning class, which are floundering and failing worse than the British Union of Fascists. There are reasons why they can't replicate the same political strategy and tactics as they did before, and some of those reasons are because we now have different environmental factors. They can't recruit defeated ex-servicemen en masse, so they now primarily recruit vulnerable alienated nerdy teen boys. They can't yet (and often don't want to) earn the blessing of the bourgeoisie at scale because the populations have shifted in a more progressive direction. So then we see neo-Nazi 'Siege' tactics emerge, which are inspired by late-1800s Propaganda of the Deed anarchist tactics, and that is not going well for them either.
Then, we have White Nationalist and/or Christian Nationalists as politicians and billionaires. They often don't want militarism or have military values. They probably don't want class collaboration (because they're winning in the class struggle). So like their goals, their tactics and strategies will overall differ to the fascist movements, despite the shared chauvanism.
If you have suggestions on how to adjust or change the definition, it would be helpful.
I worry that it is too broad, discarding what makes fascist movements unique. I believe the part about violence is ultimately redundant, as I assume systematic chauvinism itself makes individual violence and violent repression likely. The definition, in my view, is really just describing a strategy of using chauvinistic hierarchy, and I don't understand why that is special enough to be called 'fascism', if anything that will just trivialize fascist movements and make the word itself banal, since for example xenophobic chauvinism is a strategy used by almost all governments worldwide, and which does lead to domestic violence.
Carl and the Aqua Team make their position on piracy very clear.
Don't know why you'd give a joke answer at all, but there's nothing wrong with unsweetened yogurt (e.g. greek) on potato. Put chives on there, maybe some zataar. Or use it to offset a chilli sauce, make a barbecue sauce creamy. I'd even just have it by itself on fries.
How is that Stalinist? Censorship isn't some unique rare policy, even 5EYES countries regularly challenge the legality of E2EE.
I wonder if it's useful to characterize fascism as a political strategy, as it seems this might ignore the historical conditions which form it and guide it (e.g. returning military, petit-booj resistance to the labor movement to preserve their class interests) and therefore inform us of how other classes will generally act as the labor movement grows.
How would you describe fascism as a political strategy? Does this mean, for example, using scapegoats (like racial minorities and queer folk) as a threat to rally for dictatorial powers?
1) Ideologies are frameworks which guide actions, not a list of symptoms.
Ideologies are formed by material conditions in history, not just a group of ideas put together. That's why neoliberalism and fascism are also distinct, despite all the surface-level similarities we can see around the world.
Fascism wasn't just invented by someone saying 'why doesn't one person have all the power and get rid of minorities'. Fascism grew out of the conditions of the 1910s in Europe during a wave of socialist and communist uprisings which threatened the bourgeois, quelled by returning soldiers from WWI. That's why it's militaristic and ultranationalist, that's why it's anti-communist and anti-liberal.
- This list ignores other core traits, including those listed in the very next sentence after that quote, such as anti-communism anti-liberalism and anti-democratic ideas, class collaborationist, traditionalism w/ selective modernism, primary support base among the petit bourgeois, denouncement of '[haute] bourgeois capitalism' despite often working alongside the haute booj to subdue the lower class.
Fascism is born out of anti-communist sentiment in the petit-bourgeoisie (lower owning class), while two of those countries are ruled by communist parties. Russia is a haute-bourgeoisie capitalist state, not class collaborationist or petit-bourgious. China and North Korea openly dominate the haute booj rather than vice versa. Contrast these all against fascist states.
- Saying 'Check' for cases which clearly don't check:
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The CPC ('socialism with Chinese characteristics') and WPK (Juche) are not far-right. They're both generally considered far-left, and certainly not far-right (FWIW, 'left' and 'right' are a poor model for understanding politics).
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Ultranationalism is not 'lots of nationalism', it's when a country "asserts or maintains detrimental hegemony, supremacy, or other forms of control over other nations (usually through violent coercion) to pursue its specific interests." North Korea clearly doesn't have control over other nations.
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China does not believe in militaristism.
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What natural social hierarchy do these states believe in?
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Russia is individualist, not collectivist.
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What regimentation is there?
Some of those other points are debatable (such as congress party structures with a president being dictatorships, where fascists explicitly denounce that as liberalism), but these are some which are just blatant.
I'm being pedantic because lives are at stake, and recognizing different ideologies is how you learn to combat them.
But if you want to treat it like a joke, go ahead. [edit: redacting petty insult]
If you're going to complain about people knowing what they're talking about, you should at least use the right words to describe things.
You can call Russia, China and North Korea dictatorships, but each of those three are just literally not fascist. Fascism arises from different circumstances and acts differently, even if there are surface similarities to notice, and those differences are important to understand if we want to analyze them and prevent them happening here. Russia, in particular, is important to understand when looking at the USA's current neoliberal nightmare.
Video
Click to view this content.
Which really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone!
(Found this on Nuclear Change /social/)
Video
Click to view this content.
For details, see the Release notice section Bigger new windows.
This is mainly so that emotes will not be so disruptive to users on other instances. Due to how they are implemented, most of the emotes have the effect of flooding the comment sections when viewed from other instances, and due to the large amount of cross-instance posting, this is a real issue that makes even sympathetic users annoyed.
Downsizing can be done pretty effectively with an automatic script, using something standard like ImageMagick to downsize them. So, it should not be hard or timetaking for the devs to do.
This will also decrease their filesize, making them load much faster for everyone!
I've already started seeing a lot of redundant communities being made here that have already existed on other Lemmy instances, and lemmy.ml is at risk of centralization and overload, so now is a great time to raise awareness of other instances.
For science topics, mander.xyz has a lot of good ones set up, and !solarpunk@slrpnk.net on slrpnk.net has been great!
edit: for new users - you can type !
to begin autofilling a community, even for ones on other instances, like I did for the solarpunk community above. It may take a few seconds for the autofill results to show up if you have a slow connection like me.
![](https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/cc6c0e74-5049-4439-97d4-26b155dda7d0.png?thumbnail=1024&format=webp)
[yeah it's twitter junk, I know]
"Leftist" is not a helpful label here; its meaning changes internationally and personally. It was always vaguely defined and just became more vague and misused for the past two centuries.
This is an issue because:
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It leads to unresolvable persistent conflicts over what is leftist and what isn't, and therefore who is welcome here and who isn't.
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The admins' definition appears to be different from some very common definitions. In the post 'What is lemmy.ml?', they imply that a 'liberal instance' is 'something that [lemmy.ml] is not'. This will at best lead to repeated rejection of people who consider themselves 'leftist' but whom many users do not (an annoying and useless exercise for everyone involved), or at worse subversion by people who think they've found home and need to defend it against 'extremists'.
Maybe consider 'anti-capitalist' or 'socialist' as less ambiguous terms, assuming that is what you meant. This will avoid users who identify as leftists mistakenly signing up and defending the place against those it is explicitly made for.
As a demonstration of the wide range of political positions reasonably considered by people to be 'leftist', here is the Wikipedia article for 'Leftism'. Common definitions include ''pro-egalitarianism'', ''liberalism'' and various 'progressive' social rights movements.
What is this post?
A quick and dirty look into Lemmy instances, their size and interactions, and some insights.
Disclaimers
- I AM NOT AN EXPERT OR WITNESS: I only started using Lemmy in March 2022. Lemmy was around for around 3 years before that. I am not a developer or instance owner.
- I DID NOT GO AND TALK TO PEOPLE WHO UNDERSTAND THIS STUFF: This is just me exploring for fun and starting a conversation. This is not a proper study. Consider telling any one who links you to this page as if it's an expert historical account that I called them an idiot.
- This is limited by my experience and my searching, it's not comprehensive. If someone made a dark instance, I probably won't find it. If there's some deep lore, I probably don't know it.
Thanks to https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list for many of these stats.
Alright,
Now for the casual rambling.
Organic posting started on lemmy.ml from April 2019 so I will consider that the start of Lemmy as a service (my understanding is that lemmy.ml is the oldest non-dev instance)
As of now (May 2022) AFAIK, the Lemmy-based sites with the most total user comments are:
- hexbear.net (2.5M)
- lemmy.ml (114K)
- lemmygrad.ml (105K)
- bakchodi.org (42K)
- wolfballs.com (15K)
- szmer.info (15K)
- feddit.de (3K)
- [dev instances ignored]
- sopuli.xyz (1504)
- lemmy.eus (1262)
- lemmy.ca (974)
The count of users active in the last month is similar:
- hexbear.net (unlisted, approx. 1.3K in the last 14 days)
- lemmygrad.ml (508)
- lemmy.ml (474)
- bakchodi.org (286)
- szmer.info (65)
- feddit.it (51)
- sopuli.xyz (31)
- wolfballs.com (29)
- feddit.de (29)
- lemmy.ca (17)
My guess is that the difference at the bottom of the list is due to highly federated instances spreading their user comments over many instances with more activity, and also due to some instances peaking a few months ago and then declining. For those new to user statistics, you'll notice that popularity usually tends to be exponential: more popular things get more popular.
What was that first one? Hexbear?
Two of the sites listed there, Hexbear (aka. chapo.chat) and Bakchodi, do not federate. They are not part of the Fediverse, but they are using Lemmy. Hexbear is actually running their own fork of Lemmy. In that sense it reminds me of Gab, another huge island fork, but only due to size and isolation. While I can't find an admin statement, various Hexbear Gitea issues from 2020 and this comment from December 2021 "We’re working on bringing Lemmy up to speed with some of the features our “fork” (it’s more of a rewrite) has. When that’s ready we’ll switch to that which will already have federation ready for us." and this from Feb 2022 "The only issue is that [Hexbear] doesn’t support federation for semi-technical reasons (happy to explain), but that’s going to be fixed (later this year maybe)?" indicate Hexbear is open to the idea but unready (this 2020 comment even states they chose Lemmy precisely because of its federation goal), and Bakchodi appear to have just not set any up (the admin states "Federation is not functional as of now." in a post and nothing more). Contrast both against Gab who cited abuse/security issues and lack of local federation users for their voluntary removal of existing federation.
Another point regarding Hexbear and Bakchodi is that they are continuations of existing popular communities: I believe that Hexbear is a continuation of reddit's banned subreddit /r/ChapoTrapHouse, and Bakchodi is a continuation of the banned /r/chodi (which I believe was banned around the same time as /r/GenZedong's quarantining caused a mass exodus to https://lemmygrad.ml/c/genzedong ). To the best of my knowledge, lemmy.ml, most of lemmygrad, wolfballs and szmer are new original sites rather than an existing active community migrating as a mass.
Connections
Most instances are connected into the Fediverse. Hexbear and Bakchodi appears to be the only active non-trivial instances that don't federate.
Due to the political environment of the internet today and the content currently on Lemmy, I personally think it makes sense to classify the current federation networks of Lemmy instances into four loose groups:
- socialist 'left': Primarily value socialism and/or anarchism, and related topics. Generally explicit about their instance's political alignment. The largest group. Examples are lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, midwest.social, and would include hexbear.net if it were connected.
- liberalist 'right': Primarily value freedom of speech and other liberty. While none yet are e
xplicitly politically-biased through administration[correction], they do overwhelmingly have users with views typical of the American 'right-wing' as an inevitable result of where they are promoted, the ideas only they tolerate and the existing posts. Examples are wolfballs.com and exploding-heads.com. - general open: Overall mainstream OR diverse political views, will generally tolerate political instances on both sides of the above divide. Often national instances or 'general-purpose'. mander.xyz is an overt example, gtio.io is also an example. lotide.fbxl.net would be an example, but it's a lotide instance rather than Lemmy.
- anti-intolerant: Primarily value friendliness and inclusivity, and so will readily block instances that tolerate intolerance, such as those in the liberalist 'right' category and potentially those further in the socialist 'left' category. An example might be sopuli.xyz.
These are all politically determined, as unlike Mastodon and Pleroma there don't tend to be any instances based around controversial single topics or around graphic content that causes instances to defederate. I thought there were more instances that blocked both sides of the 'left'/'right' divide, but they don't seem to exist yet (which is a good sign) beyond lemmy.rollenspiel.monster. It is also worth mentioning that lemmy.ml has blocked some instances due to abuse rather than any cultural disagreement.
The first two of the four categories are by far the most popular, even if not the most numerous in instances, probably due to them picking up users being kicked out of reddit and reddit alternatives as they block more and more political subreddits or become unsavory. The earlier kicking of many 'harassment' subreddits from reddit around 2015 lead to many 'right-wing' users to populate Voat and then later bannings lead to communities.win becoming popular, which I believe explains why Lemmy doesn't yet have a strong influx of users who align politically with those banned subreddits and more-so with recently-banned communist subreddits (the core developers' political views and lemmy.ml's reputation may have impacted people moving to instances named after Lemmy or considering hosting new instances, but I suspect it wouldn't affect people who were invited to a place called Wolfballs).
Interestingly, there is already a mirror instance that reposts from reddit: goldandblack.us.to
Growth
fediverse.observer has some stats. Ignoring the huge outliers in the middle, there has been a jump in growth in the past two months which I would mostly attribute to the influx to lemmygrad.ml wow look at that second graph and the launch of unfederated-but-included bakchodi. Apart from that, there has been a remarkably consistent growth in all the active instances. That's a good sign that this group of communities could last a while.
Some concluding thoughts, with regards to reddit
As someone who hasn't really used reddit in many years, I like to promote the view of us being independent, growing our own culture, our own norms and not merely aiming to mirror the same shallow emptiness. The bottom line is, we grow a lot when reddit shuts a place down, and as you can see in some of those stats, growth creates more potential for growth. I think it's important to think about what habits we see now both here and there that we want to encourage, and which habits we don't. Think about what should each community tolerate and reject and enforce (and make no mistake, that answer differs depending on purpose and audience!) and how do we redirect people in the wrong places or teach those who are mistaken? (protip: typing these things out each time is very dumb! That's why we invented FAQ pages!) What struggles did Mastodon face as they started to grow more and more?
Parts of reddit and similar groups will continue to arrive. Look at this list of communities that used to be allowed: it started off with the very blatant controversies like sexualizing minors, moved on to open blatant racism-focused places that conducted raids, and now they're at banning subreddits about a US (former) president and pro-China memes. Now that Lemmy has established itself as the home of some of the most recently banned communities, I personally think it's only a matter of time before reddit pops off a few more communities as they face pressure from media flak, investors or other major influences, and we should prepare for how to handle this: make potentially targeted communities aware that we exist before an incident, and make sure communities have a clear set of rules and guidelines written for the people that come in expecting this to be reddit again. I think this is an opportunity to fix the things we don't want repeated.