People's Court

I read Lemmygrad in public so it is kinda bad, especially with the recent war in Ukraine, to see nazi imagery in Lemmygrad posts unblurred, so I suggest that we blur any posts with nazi imagery so that people can choose when they want to see the posts that contain it.

I've seen plenty of posts around here lately about how we should explain things patiently to the liberals. But it's hard to be patient when they come into our communities uninvited and start an argument over something that's so obvious to us, over and over again, especially when they're also full of american chauvinism (I recall one guy a while ago who didn't believe the occupation of south Korea was real). It's plain frustrating and not conducive to a meaningful discussion. Besides, can't speak for others, but personally I sometimes want to enjoy fellow communists' posts without having some lib causing a mess in the comment section.

I think isolating them into a particular community (maybe call it something like /c/debatecommunism) could be helpful for the following reasons:

• We can engage on our own terms. When I feel like debating, I could go there and do it. When not, enjoy the rest of the site without being bothered by them. That'd also make it easier to be patient with them.
• Have past questions in one place. If someone is genuinely there to ask questions in good faith, they could read a previous thread if the question was already recently asked.
• Could make a sidebar or a stickied post with links to resources.
• If some experienced people are willing to moderate such a community, it would have more effective moderation than the current state of moderation falling on whoever happens to be the mods of the community the argument started in, or on the site admins if something is reported. There is a line between debating and just insulting us or being racist towards whoever is liberals' designated enemy right now.

With "isolate", I mean, creating the "debate communism" (or whatever other name we'd choose) community, and a policy of reporting/removing liberal-attempting-to-debate-us comments everywhere else on this instance.

Thoughts? Are there any downsides to this that I have failed to see? Are the obnoxious posters from other instances not a big deal for everyone else and I'm the only one who is bothered?

(I'm sorry if I phrased something badly. I'm really not good at words...)

Hi. I wanted to talk about an issue that has been bothering me for a long time and that is the quality of the publications that are being made lately in the Leftsthetics community.

I have a specific problem with the user “Роძэя ΟЬяэяо” who I think has not understood the purpose of that community very well. The description of the community reads as follows:

For propaganda posters, art, influential photos, and anything else that promotes the aesthetics of revolution and the Left.

The problem is that this user does not upload anything that has to do with socialist or Marxist aesthetics. With so many artistic and aesthetic expressions of this movement, I don't understand how they can use the community to upload memes, which are also in Spanish. They also share famous quotes from great thinkers but again, is out of place in this community. In fact, this user currently moderates the Latino Marxist community and they have not even oriented it towards anything concrete, it is an accumulation of his publications that are completely decontextualised. And always, in all publications, it says "Latino Marxist", without descriptions or anything, as if it were some kind of branding or an automated bot. It gives a very bad image and worsens the impression of Lemmygrad.

I don't want to promote hatred towards this user because I doubt their intentions are evil, but I think this community has a lot of potential and right now it is full of out-of-context posts and memes. For that we already have other communities with more varied subject matter.

I attach examples where you can see what I am talking about. Having said that, I hope that the moderators will do something to improve the quality of the publications. Thank you.

Edit v1.01: Change pronouns (he/him -> they/them)

The community [email protected] is not an official avenue of communication as it appears to suggest. The community has always been fairly inactive, but now there’s Lemmy.world users posting in it after a year-long post hiatus.

Would it be better to restrict the community and redirect people to Lemmy’s official GitHub where people can and do post suggestions that have a more serious chance to get heard by Lemmy developers?

There are so many >1MB images on the web and it's annoying to always have to downscale them. I'm not asking to remove the limits, as lemmy only has a finite space. But having it on 2MB sounds like a nice way to have people upload pics that are original resolutiom, but now too big.

Would like for us to get ahead of this instead of having to scramble

The site has been seemingly defaced yet again, by another account called RedArcher9, who joined around 9 hours ago as of the time of this post. The banner's image of the user has been provided in the post. This is the first thing I read when I was made aware of their urgent promotion of the "new edits to the site's history": "ProleWiki often serves as a 'gateway' for Communists to be indoctrinated into chauvinistic and revisionary ideology, with the site actively promoting 'Patriotic Socialist' and other social-chauvinist points of view and allowing users of those persuasions into the project."

I didn't read the rest of their horseshit because I have other things I would rather occupy my time with than the same trend of erasing and re-writing history which the US already does at scale.

I don't know the current policies for allowing people to become editors, but this game of cat and mouse with Wisconcom has become very tiresome. I propose a freeze on the creation or promotion of accounts to have edit permissions, and restrict such promotion to only those who have been around (for a good while) and earned the trust of the Lemmygrad netizens. This will make it a lot more expensive for them to pull this crap. In order to have an account that can edit the wiki, I also suggest that person open a People's Court case and have everyone (minus accounts that are obviously fake accounts or suspicious based on how new they are and what they've been up to) come to a consensus based on the user's credibility and history of contribution to Lemmygrad. If anyone has any thoughts to offer in good faith, I encourage you to leave feedback. I think it's time to put a stop to this bullshit.

Hexbear is far more likely to have users entering and using our comms, being another large socialist instance, albeit dedicated to left unity rather than Marxism like ourselves. I think there is enough of a culture change that we need to have a pinned post for hexbear users coming here explaining what kind of content/attitudes they might see here/what different rules to follow

There should also be a section dedicated to explaining to lemmygrad users to respect hexbear comm rules and what to expect from their users etc.

I think this would help ease any potential cross site struggle sessions

With the Reddit exodus, there's been a significant increase in the number of bad-faith liberals commenting on communities like LSC. I don't personally think we should ban liberals from all communities if they're being respectful, but immediate hostility breaks the instance's third rule and seeing it everywhere might make some users uncomfortable. In particular, the bigger communities that only have admins as mods (I get the feeling that they have a lot to deal with already) or have inactive mods might need some help

~I\ haven't\ spoken\ to\ any\ admins\ about\ this\ so\ ignore\ this\ if\ it's\ already\ being\ dealt\ with~

A couple of users on the genzedong matrix chat expressed concern over Lemmygrad's lack of privacy policy. Lemmy already supports setting legal information in the site admin settings (although it's hard to find the legal page if you don't already know about it since there are no links to there).

It could also be worth letting admins on other instances know about this feature, as I'm sure many of them would want to add privacy policies to their instances as well.

A community dedicated to critical left unity and the synthesis of ideas. Everyone is welcome here, but, please avoid uncritical or unproductive sectarianism.

(Please read the rest of their sidebar as well to get a feel)

We as Marxists (regardless of whether ML, trot, Maoist, etc) I believe tend to universally uphold the notion that left-unity is not Marxist. That we practice only Marxist-unity (and with plenty of criticism amongst ourselves at that for non-ML's especially that often goes as far as exclusion for those who don't support AES at least critically).

To put it bluntly: I do not want people who practice left-unity to get a beachhead or toehold here with a dedicated community.

There is an anarchist alternative (raddle), at least one anarchist instance to my recollections on lemmy itself and most liberal and left leaning instances on lemmy allow anarchists but explicitly ban Marxists.

In other words, this is our one, singular space which these people are now pushing into. We should not cede an inch of it to allowing non-Marxists and those who discourage vicious criticism and yes even venting and sneering and meming on of the compatible-left, the CIA-left, the synthetic-left and other such names.

I'll note that hexbear is basically a left unity platform and will be federating with us shortly. They tolerate and allow anarchists and discussion between them and ML's so such content would be better there.

I believe at any rate that anarchists are not disallowed from here if they're here to ask honest questions and not just spew imperialist propaganda and anti-communist, anti-AES dogma. Thus the community serves as nothing more than an attempted safe-space for anarchists and other deviations (left, right, etc), a safe harbor from site rules and standards.

Not sure if it violates Lemmygrad's rules.

With the sleepless one's new bots and other AI's out there, I think it would be nice to have a storage for every interesting autogenerated picture

Under the name @Academicproletarian he sent me this message:

Hey, comrade! I see you are an editor on ProleWiki, that's super great!

Let's get down to brass-tacks. I'm the Chief Commissar of the Internal Security Group of ProleWiki. I myself have banned millions of people from our great echo-chamber.

I've just been ordered personally by our great founder Forte to improve our page on Stalinism. It turns out that Stalinism, or more fully, Marxism—Leninism—Stalinism (MLS) really does exist as an ideology.

As such, he wants us to rewrite our incorrect page on Stalinism to indicate that it really does exist. He also told me to use this excellently-written writing on MLS as a reference. This writing was made by a genius pioneer of Wisconsinite Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist theory. Thus it is a VERY good source.

Thank you!

It seems that they're going after ProleWiki again, (in this case attempting to have the "Stalinism" page "corrected."

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/565483

As you guys can tell, this community is dead (again). I haven't really done a good job of moderating because my ability to come up with post ideas fizzled out pretty quickly, and life circumstances made me totally neglect this community. I'd like to stop moderating it, so if anyone else is willing please tell. If people even want a community for drugs, you should also voice your opinion.

As I said in a comment on the post asking about this community (and pinged the creator), I would give them the rest of Monday to get back to us about this community and their reasoning, and they never got back to me. Nor did they get back to anyone on that posted memes to that community, nor did they ever post anything in their two months here apart from creating that community.

Plus there's already a c/trotskyism community.

The account feels suspicious but obviously at this time we have nothing to go on and so will not ban OP.

As a general rule, be wary -- but not paranoid -- if someone DMs you for reasons that seem strange. Like if they ask a lot of questions from the get go or want to get to know you. Remember you don't have to answer anything you don't want to and you don't have to provide justification for it.

It seems someone has created a /c/trotskyists community. I believe this community should be removed for what I think are obvious reasons.

Very good job on the part of community mods who backed up and deleted their communities pre-emptively.

I went ahead and deleted the last few communities, which had just 6 posts on them on average.

From now on, please only post to [email protected] and [email protected]. Please do not make new "Shit X Say" type communities.

Two communities were archived, these are Shit Liberals Say and Shit Fascists Say. They were made "mod-only", which means you cannot post there but can still comment on existing posts. We decided to archive them by popular demand and because there were so many posts on them people didn't want to lose.

For those out of the loop, we are merging all "Shit X Say" communities into just two: [email protected] and [email protected].

From this moment: users are not allowed to make new communities in the "Shit X Say" vein and should not post in any "Shit X Say" community that is not one of the two above.

7 days from now: we will delete the extra communities (all except the 2 above)

If you mod a Shit X Say type community, back up the posts before we delete them. Just copy the URL as they are not entirely deleted from the server, just hidden.

We also recommend you put your communities on mod only so that people don't inadvertently post new content there (just click on this icon and then check the "make community mod only):

Or alternatively, pre-emptively delete your community if you've backed up the posts.

For now we will place everything in Shit Liberals Say, which should become Shit Reactionaries Say, but there's discussion about just making a Shit Reactionaries Say community. Personally I'm not sure which is best. There's 1.5k posts on SLS and we would basically lose all of them, but at the same time it might confuse people to post to Shit "Liberals" Say about monarchists or fascists.

The merger is going along nicely and I will soon announce the grace period (after which we will delete all SXS communities except for SLS and a Shit Ultras Say community that will be created).

Most mods of the soon-to-be deleted communities have given me their approval for deletion and have already backed up their post URLs.

However, SLS is not responding. We want to merge (most) everything into that community as the name is easily recognisable and it's the biggest community for that, meaning they wouldn't have to back up the hundreds of posts that were made there.

At this time however only one mod of SLS, @[email protected] is somewhat still active on Lemmygrad -- and they haven't got back to me regarding the merging, which will probably make SLS much more active.

What I'm proposing to the community then is that all the mods of soon-to-be deleted communities be named mods of SLS. Easiest solution in my opinion.

After the merger is complete, there will only be two communities allowed for Shit X Say types community: SLS, renamed Shit Reactionaries Say, and Shit Ultras Say. All other communities of this type will not be allowed anymore.

As the lemmygrad community was heavily in agreement of merging our many (~10) "Shit X Say" communities into one, we are moving forward with that.

But here I'm proposing the last call to make your voice heard before we start deleting stuff.

Our proposition is to have 2 communities :

• Keep ShitLiberalsSay for all things from reactionaries and non-communists, because it's a big and active community
• Create a new ShitUltrasSay community for all things from "leftists", e.g. MLMs, anarchists, trots, patsocs, ultras, leftcoms...

The merger will look like this (again still a proposition):

• In a first step, a grace period of several days is allowed so that you can save content from all the deleted communities. We'll also announce which communities will be merged where.
• In a second step, we will delete the superfluous communities. This means all their content and comments will be deleted from the front end, but still accessible via direct link.
• In a third step, we have to assign the new ShitUltrasSay community (not yet created) to someone. I'm not entirely sure about how to solve that yet. If all the current mods of Shit X Say community want to pitch in and decide between themselves if they want to mod together or something.
• After that, we will clarify in the main sidebar that everything should be posted in those two communities and we will delete all new communities that bear the Shit X Say label that can fit into one of the two existing communities.

All inputs welcome of course.

Going along with the theme of this thread yesterday, the admin team here has decided to remove these two communities.

Not only are people getting tired of seeing cringe / reactionary content fill up lemmygrad, but it doesn't create a very welcoming atmosphere for new people, or those wanting to sign up, to see a bunch of reactionary content / hate speech directed at you.

We don't want to host that content, or make other people see it.

We'll evaluate these cringe-type / reactionary-content communities on a case-by-case basis, to decide if they should stay or not. Feel free to comment any below that you think should probably be removed.

Stay vigilant comrades, and if you see too much reactionary content being posted to lemmygrad, report it and we'll get to it as soon as we can.

<3

There are a lot of "Shit X Says" communities now, which inevitably leads to quite a few cross-posts and makes people less likely to see others' comments (e.g. someone comments on a "Shit Liberals Say" post, someone else on the "Shit Fascists Say" version of the post, etc.). It might be a good idea to just have one "Shit Reactionaries Say" community, either by creating a new one or by repurposing the most popular one (SLS), and then setting the other communities to only allow mod posts (basically read-only).
~Thank\ you\ for\ coming\ to\ my\ TEDxLemmygrad\ talk.\ Proposal\ co-authored\ with\ a\ second\ mysterious\ tankie~

Addendum: may be a good idea to also have one community for ultra-leftists separate from the one for general reactionaries.