Even from people that never lived in a communist state
edit: im 17 and i hate communism
Lemmy, the social network, started off as a leftist hangout spot.
From the perspective of “Open Source developers who are anti-Reddit pro-Fediverse”, it makes a lot of sense for Leftist/Communist and anti-corporation leaning people to hang out.
After all, the more extreme the viewpoint, the more driven to action (ie: write tens-of-thousands of lines of code and release for free) people get. In some regards, its the nature of Open Source + volunteer effort to attract a more extreme ideology. IE: Free Software is driven by ideology, not by money. So you get ideological people, especially when the software is small and niche.
The July 2023 Reddit Blackout was a big challenge for Lemmy’s old community and the new community, as the new community basically “invaded” a large scale leftist hangout spot. But hopefully we all learn to work together and the nature of our neighbors moving forward.
I think anyone here (likely everyone?) is at least on the anti-corporate anti-Reddit side of the discussion. Which is enough of an alliance to keep us together, for now.
It does mean that we’ll have to keep up with the far-left old-timers on this network who wish to push their viewpoints. But they are the legacy and the start of Lemmy in some respects, even as the hypergrowth (starting in July 2023) has moderated the community pretty severely.
I don’t see the problem with people having communist views…capitalism isn’t great.
Yeah, the problem is that you have instances like Hexbear and Lemmy.ml that tread more into tankie territory, where if you argue anything less than the complete annihilation of the West and hail China, you’re likely to get harassed. I think rational people can agree that there’s a pretty gap between “The current system is corrupt” and "anyone who thinks differently than me should die,’ but I’ve seen plenty of irrational leftists.
Came here to make this point.
The CCP’s version of “communism” is almost a textbook example to me of how an interesting system that can work beautifully on the local level can be completely betrayed and turned in to something much more like an oligarchy.
I don’t understand how someone of reasonable knowledge and judgement could possibly be a tankie in 2024.
I don’t agree with that crowd at all politically, but I don’t agree with everyone on all Web forums out there, all subreddits, all Usenet groups, or such either. We can share an Internet without it being a problem, I think. Just means that I tend to avoid a couple of instances and communities.
l’d be more worried about influence attempts, astroturfing, than people who openly take a position. Having a hexbear or lemmygrad home instance is being pretty open about one’s positions.
Just to point out, Lemmy.ml isn’t really like that, with a few exceptions. Before the big influx of Reddit refugees, it used to be the default Lemmy instance, and so has quite a few non-political communities.
It’s Lemmygrad.ml that’s the super tanky echo chamber.
I mean, I don’t have much problem with people disagreeing with me. But I’m pretty openly pro-capitalist, though I’m not a dumbass libertarian.
I recognize the need for the “capitalist edge cases” (externalities, monopolies, etc. etc.) that must be regulated and fixed for the system to work. I also recognize that we’ve failed to regulate externalities (ex: CO2 emissions), and failed to regulate monopolies / anticompetitive behavior (see Google).
So I’m a “capitalism works, but only if we work to make it work” kind of person. I think at the moment, Reddit and many other social networks are falling into the well known and well studied failures of raw capitalism, but somehow today’s society has forgotten all the 1910s era solutions that we did (ex: Jungle, etc. etc.) where we regulated the hell out of the shitty behavior and fixed the most blatant problems, for the better of America.
We just gotta do the same thing today.
Overall, I accept that the commies / tankies were here first, and the history of Lemmy makes it clear why that happened.
So I’m a “capitalism works, but only if we work to make it work” kind of person. I think at the moment, Reddit and many other social networks are falling into the well known and well studied failures of raw capitalism, but somehow today’s society has forgotten all the 1910s era solutions that we did (ex: Jungle, etc. etc.) where we regulated the hell out of the shitty behavior and fixed the most blatant problems, for the better of America.
Right there with you.
We just gotta do the same thing today.
We also HAVE to teach the kids how to protect it better than people did 100 years ago. Most of our problems today stem from people voting to remove “useless red tape” (that was put there for damn good reasons).
My problem with communist views is they’re unproven and have only lead to authoritarian governments when put into play.
Capitalism has regularly gone off the rails … but not to the degree communism has. Capitalism has been defending democracy for the last few centuries, not communism.
These are the nations that identify as communist:
- China (PRC)
- Cuba
- Laos
- North Korea (DPRK)
- Vietnam
These countries were previously communist and (of that has that) have pretty much only improved since transitioning to democracy with capitalist economic systems:
- Afghanistan
- Albania
- Angola
- Benin
- Bulgaria
- Congo
- Czechoslovakia
- Ethiopia
- Germany (GDR)
- Grenada
- Hungary
- Kampuchea
- Mongolia
- Mozambique
- Poland
- Romania
- Somalia
- Soviet Union
- Tuva
- Yemen (PDRY)
- Yugoslavia
That’s not to say that capitalism doesn’t have its problems, people here aren’t angry with it over nothing. However, if you really look at the problems it’s had, they all come down to voter manipulation and/or apathy “things are going good, why do I need to worry about politics?”.
We didn’t just wake up with weakened labor unions, weakened voter rights, weakened infrastructure, etc; we got their because of generations of apathy and frankly electing the wrong people. People that cut taxes, asked “are you better off today than you were four years ago?” (short term gain), allowed our unions to be broken up, allowed jobs to be exported over seas to communist China (which is now one of the greatest international threats), bought the cheapest products (from mom and dad at the store to the executives running major corporations) without asking why they’re cheap, etc.
The “common people” cast the votes that ultimately lead to corporations being people. The “middle class” cost votes that ultimately lead to the middle class shrinking.
I think it’s naive that communism somehow automatically makes those problems go away/means we’ll never end up with similar problems. Especially when communist countries are consistently doing worse/falling into authoritarian rule.
We need to expand our social programs, reign in our billionaires, and reign in our corporations and we’d be a lot better off. Capitalism works so long as you don’t let anyone or anything get “too big to fail.” Capitalism doesn’t have to be capitalism without limits. The reigns of power will always be challenged no matter what system we find ourselves under, only an educated vigilant population can stop that.
Capitalism “going off the rails” completely understates it. The history of the last 500 years is soaked in the blood of the capitalism. Voter apathy has nothing to do with it. Enthusiastic voters gave us genocide of indigenous peoples of North America, the nuclear bombing of Japan, and currently a 75 year genocide of Palestinians. Not to mention things that voters do not have even the semblance of a choice, such as CIA activities in the 20th century which led to bloody coups in Indonesia, Chile, and Iran, just to name 3.
You need to incorporate class analysis or else nothing makes sense. Why do American voters get shitty choices that reduce their power to the advantage of the wealthy oligarch class? Why are there oligarchs if capitalism doesn’t tend to monopoly? Does voting actually do anything? Why does the electoral college still exist? Why did Americans support the Iraq War? What role did the media serve?
I think it’s naive that communism somehow automatically makes those problems go away/means we’ll never end up with similar problems. Especially when communist countries are consistently doing worse/falling into authoritarian rule.
Communism doesn’t automatically make anything go away. The point is that the ruling class of capitalists are an obstacle to making things go away. I’m not sure what is your criteria for authoritarian rule. Capitalist countries are authoritarian too, it’s basically a meaningless signifier coming out of cold war propaganda that said communism = dictatorship and capitalism = muh freedom. The democratic processes in China and Cuba of example are lightyears ahead of what you can find in the US or European parliamentary so-called democracies.
I think anyone here (likely everyone?) is at least on the anti-corporate anti-Reddit side of the discussion.
I don’t particularly have any problem with Reddit beyond the fact that (a) I don’t like their “new” Web UI and (b) the fact that one of the moves that they made to monetize their service was to ban third-party clients, which is a tradeoff that I’m not willing to make.
I mean, I was expecting that at some point, Reddit was going to have to have to shift from growth to monetization. I just didn’t agree with the particular tradeoff that they chose to make.
Are you okay with the advertising? That’s another thing that I find unacceptable.
I don’t really know what ads they showed, as I used an ad-blocker. I’d believe that it’s probably annoying, but the same is true of most websites that show ads. Reddit Gold provided a commercial ad-free option, so it wasn’t a requirement even without blocked ads. And unlike most companies, it was possible to purchase Reddit Gold without linking to one’s financial data, since they provided purchase options bounced through cryptocurrency and such. As web services go, I suppose it was probably a fair bit better than the average.
I’d have probably been willing to buy commercial Reddit service – I mean, I’ve subscribed to Usenet service, have commercial email hosting service, have commercial VPS service. I don’t have a problem with commercial service, as long as it’s something solid. The value-for-money was probably pretty good, given how much I used it. I just don’t want to be obliged to run their binary code on my systems and have data extracted from my system and be data-mined other than what they get from my web browser or open-source client.
In the beginning, I was okay with the ads on Reddit. But then, Reddit just kept making stupid decision after stupid decision on the official app’s UI, so I switched to a third party app, that happens to also have no Reddit ads. When Reddit killed the apps and continued making the official experience worse, I bailed Reddit and came here because I’m not supporting a greedy platform.
What are you on about? “its the nature of Open Source + volunteer effort to attract a more extreme ideology”? Aside from your first sentence, this is just baseless word salad.
I mean just that.
Open source developers are not paid in money. One of the other major motivators is ideology, so that becomes a major motivator in practice.
Multiple reasons.
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Lemmy was crested by and is maintained by Marxist-Leninists.
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Lemmy’s structure and rejection of the Profit Motive is in line with Communist ideals, and attracts Communists and other leftists over Reddit, which is Capitalist.
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FOSS in general is supported by Communists and Anarchists.
FOSS is strongly supported by communists, but there’s also strong support for it from right-libertarians (when I was younger I remember the stereotype being that Linux users believed taxation was theft)
(I agree that the way FOSS operates is anarcho-communist in nature; I just think people with fringe politics are more likely to support FOSS in general)
Point 3 is true for almost any group you can think of. Communists, anarchists, Baptists, disestablishmentarians, etc., for any large group of people of course some of them will advocate for FOSS.
Be careful where you tread here. You must be careful to separate “communists” (people who believe in economic reorganization away from the power of capital) and “tankies” (those who support corrupt regimes that project the illusion of communism).
There are indeed quite a few communists and various other alt-camp political spectrum believers on here. They do have quite liberal beliefs but don’t typically cause much of a fuss, because rational people can coexist with differing beliefs… and i dont mind them one bit. But the tankes, like lemmygrad, hexbear, etc, do stir up an anti-west "commie propaganda"fuss every chance they get, without being related to actual communism, especially if one mentions a hot button like Israel or Ukraine. And if you get into an argument with a tankie, they will just sling mud on you and call you a Nazi.
The cool part is, you can filter a lot of the chaff by just blocking the ugly instances from your user settings page (since Lemmy supports that now), blocking frequent flyers, and trimming/moving your subscribed community list to other, often smaller instances. A minimal amount of effort VASTLY increases the quality of content you’ll see on lemmy.
There are very few real communists left. On here, it’s going to be pretty much all tankies.
I’d definitely describe myself as a communist, but I do realize we never had a proper communist state on this planet, just authoritarian states that acted like communists to win over the workers. Capitalism needs to be regulated as fuck to create a fair society, so for now, I strive for socialism, because I understand going straight to communism probably won’t work.
Sorry if this was uncalled for, I just wanted to show there are sensible communists who don’t excuse Russia and China for the shit they’re pulling. But neither do I excuse the west for a lot of shit we are pulling.
Those states would agree that they have not achieved communism, and they would agree that they are authoritarian, namely the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin, 1917, The State and Revolution
There is a clear contradiction in this comment.
Capitalism needs to be regulated as fuck to create a fair society, so for now, I strive for socialism, because I understand going straight to communism probably won’t work.
Isn’t this the exact reasoning behind China’s market reforms, beginning under Deng Xiaoping?
If we take this poster at their word, then their disagreement with modern China is not ideological in nature!
Does that mean their disagreement is about the practical implementation? Of course not! That would contradict a key piece of evidence: This World Bank report!
According to the report, 800 million Chinese people have been lifted out of poverty - accounting for three quarters of worldwide poverty reduction! No reasonable person could called that a failed implementation!
If this poster really supports a transitional phase of regulated markets, then why would they be condemning China for successfully implementing the very approach they advocate for?
Global news communities in instances like beehaw or lemmy.world seem to have predominantly communist and leftist posters. The nazbols congregate on their own famous three instances.
Show me a single comment on Hexbear or lemmy.ml or lemmygrad that promotes nazbols or patsocs or MAGA communists or LaRouchites like Dugin or Hinkle or Haz or Maupin.
“It wasn’t real socialism!!1!” lmao
This is the position you get when you understand capitalism is fucked but you still believe capitalist states’ propaganda about socialist revolutions that have actually managed to successfully overthrow the capitalist class, which gets worse the more those states have managed to rival and threaten capitalist rule globally.
Leaves platform enshittified by capitalism
Complains about people being communists
Bruh
Yes, but it was not enshittified by capitalism, instead it was the evil corporation that wanted more money
without capitalism this company wouldn’t have existed and you could only share you thoughts on one single website. without competition, imagine that
I think it’s because my rent is a third of my income and im not allowed to function without not only feeding the parasites but making them morbidly obese.
so first you choose these parasites and then you hate them? How unfortunate…
It’s not really a choice. If you don’t want to be on the streets then you have two options: buy or rent. (There is a third: squatting, but that has its own downsides.) Presumably riodoro1 can’t buy (or has chosen not to for some other reason) and doesn’t want to be homeless or a squatter.
