Because the internet is a place where people from the real world come to share their thoughts? I hate to break it to you, but their presence here means they exist in the real world too. So your question could just as well be “why are there so many commies in the world”?
Why so snarky? I just noticed that fed is way more communist than any other space I have ever been in and I am a lecturer at a very left leaning University, living in a very left leaning community.
I only replied with a snarky tone because you started the thread with snark in the title.
Guess it must be that they feel comfortable sharing their views here unlike in real life. I’m all for it, if that’s the case. People should be able to express themselves.
Sorry if I came across that way my friend.
I am a neutral observer and was just surprised. Wish you all the best in your endeavours. Keep well.
I personally like it
My thought on why you see more communists, anarchists, and leftists in general in open source and federated platforms is that efforts centered around collaboration are likely to draw people who are more collaborative-minded.
Eventually logic and educated thought will drive them to somewhere else. Their ideas look great on paper but never live up to the hype. Human society doesn’t cooperate well in groups larger than one hundred. You need strict rules and major punishments for large groups and that leads to an imbalance of power and authoritarian rule.
Specific to Lemmy, perhaps because it was/is developed by communists in reaction to a perceived pro-western, America-centric bias on the rest of the web? See the History of Lemmy.
- lemmy’s two main developers are marxist-leninists
- the largest and most active instance prior to the reddit exodus was hexbear, which is a “big tent” of revolutionary leftism, featuring mostly communists and some anarchists
- lemmygrad, an explicitly marxist-leninist instance, is also relatively large
This is fascinating to me. Thank you. Do you have some insight into how the leadership and centralisation of power dilemma of traditional leninist ideology is reconciled within the fed? I noticed many of my student groups running into issues with the concept.
The fediverse isn’t a political organization that’s going to enact change in the real world, so those concerns largely aren’t relevant. Admins (and devs) generally speaking do hold a monopoly of power but that’s the standard for the internet.
And to speak to grad and hexbear, a large part of the reason there are commies here is because they were driven off other platforms. Hexbear and Grad are both decendent from active communities that reddit banned.
Seeing all the scaremongering about those communities here reminds me of the old comic. :
