Liberalism has an actual definition, and it is not the colloquial definition used in mass-media to refer to “the left half of what is acceptable.”

Liberalism is an idealist (another word which has a very specific definition) political philosophy which champions private property, constitutionalism, republicanism, rule of law, and free trade. It has a philosophical canon, flowing through writers like Locke, Montesquieu, Mirabeau, Rousseau, Paine, etc. Further economic works, like Smith’s “Wealth of Nations,” are built on this philosophical underpinning.

Marxists are materialists. This is in contrast with the idealism of Liberals. While Liberals believe ideas are the force which drives change in the material world, Marxists understand that ideas are just a reflection of the material conditions they emerge from.

Liberals find themselves banging their heads against the walls of the institutions time and time again, because from their perspective, these institutions are just a reflection of ideas, and as long as the justification for an institution on paper is sound, there is no reason to think it cannot be reformed. An institution like the US Congress, or the Executive Branch is never at fault. It is simply a good institution simply being run by bad people. Marxists (and Anarchists) reject this quite simply, by looking at the material incentives involved, and the long ghastly history surrounding these institutions.

“Combating liberalism” does not mean being a piece of shit to anybody to the right of Bernie Sanders or Jeromy Corbin. There is a genuine struggle to ensure the new crop of social media platforms don’t simply end up defending the legitimacy of the established institutions at the expense of genuine radicals who find themselves at odds with the actual longstanding policy and practices of these institutions. To avoid situations like when mastodon.lol banned CODEPINK, a prominent anti-war organization, for being “Tankies.” This is Liberalism, and it should be combated.

On Discord, you cannot host your own server, and you cannot use any third party clients (without the threat of being banned).

You can host your own Matrix server, either on physical hardware, or a generic virtual machine you can rent from any number of ISPs. There are over a dozen compatible third-party clients (though many lack full feature coverage).

In summary, Discord is strictly a service. Matrix is a tool you can apply however you see fit.

Support for groups (i.e. communities on Lemmy) is coming to Mastodon sometime soon.

In general, I find the term “democratic socialism” to be pretty cringe. It’s like saying right up front “I’m not like those OTHER socialists!” Socialism is a liberatory project. Socialism is the auto-emancipation of the working class. THAT is what democracy looks like. Rule of the people.

Liberation comes hand in hand with revolution though. Socialism will certainly NOT be very democratic for the people who own vast amounts of real estate, productive machinery, and propaganda media empires. Those people will certainly need to end up on the wrong side of a gun for the project to succeed. The wise ones among them won’t force us to pull the trigger.

It will be a hostile take-over. It will be a break from the constitutional order. It will be a break from the “rule of law.” When the ruling class starts losing the game, they will flip over the table. All your precious civil liberties will be torn to shreds. Fascism is simply capitalism under crisis.

The Liberals commit themselves to playing by the rules even when the fascists never would. Salvador Allende (the world’s first elected Marxist head of state) tried to do this, and in three years it ended in his death and a fascist military dictatorship. There is no room for idealism in revolution. The stakes are very real. You need to crush your enemies by any means necessary. Maybe you don’t give Rupert Murdoch the freedom of speech. Maybe you don’t respect Jeff Bezos’s property rights. Maybe you stuff all the Proud Boys into a mineshaft.

A lot of people whine about authoritarianism in the English speaking left, but the English-speaking left has no power to speak of. Just a bunch of very online sectarians bickering. We run around trying to cancel internet forums which amount to little more than fucking book clubs, as if they were the embodiment of high Stalinism.

You should be aware that the people over at Raddle have a massive grudge against Lemmy and they post shit like this all the time.

It is true. You can host an image somewhere (i.e. actually run the web server) paste a link to it, and if anybody clicks on it they will show up in your web server’s access log. Typically this will include an IP address and a user agent string (indicating OS, browser version, etc.). To mitigate this, Lemmy would need store copies of any media which gets linked here and serve those instead of allowing hot-links. Mastodon does this, but for the same reason it requires hundreds of gigabytes of storage to run a small instance.

This has been the dynamic on Mastodon for years now, and I don’t think it is really a problem. Framing the problem itself as “free speech” vs. “censorship” itself is often used as a fascist canard when it is really a matter of the freedom of association. Communities choose who to associate with and who not to associate with. Moderation, to prevent harassment and abuse, to keep the discussion on topic, to remove illegal content, is a very NORMAL thing. It starts with small tools like temp-bans from communities, and increases in scale to permanent bans from instances, or de-federation if an instance proves to be a continuous torrent of abuse.

There are a lot of cases of genuine censorship which take place on commercial platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, but these “free speech extremists” are always more concerned about whether or not they can use slurs and spew blood libel than they are about what happened to r/BlueLeaks.

Or is it usual for people to run instances from their homes using common ISP subscriber variable IP addresses?

No. That that would be absolutely ridiculous for anything beyond an ephemeral CounterStrike server.

Step one: Post

Post cool / funny / poignant shit which isn’t just pictures of your lunch. Lunchposters are the bottom of the barrel. At least post pictures of your cat. Same goes for Free Software. Free Software is great, but when you’re joining a Free Software social network, you don’t want to be the millionth guy posting about ArchLinux or Emacs every day. This is the quickest path of turning free social networks into ham radio (which is also great), where a bunch of boomers get on the radio and talk to each other about their radios.

Step two: Network

Find cool people. This is more difficult without an AlGoRiThM, but try out different hashtags (which you can also follow), dive into the local/federated feeds and try to find one or two people to follow at a time.

Step three: Engage

If you have a good bit or meme (or insight, even) that’s relevant, engage. Don’t be a reply-guy though. Don’t fall into the trap of just showing up in the mentions of the same 5 people every day. Never stop posting your own shit, even if it gets little engagement initially. No one will follow you when they are guaranteed to see your dogshit posts below the person they actually care about anyway. Follow back the people who follow you. When one of your posts really takes off and gets a lot of likes, look for the people who scrolled your profile and liked the shit you actually care about instead of whatever random meme that you got trending. Those people are your most powerful allies.

You get likes (and discovery) from making insightful replies, but you will only get follows if you are posting interesting stuff of your own.

Pure ideology!

As somebody who has been bouncing around on alternative social media sites for years now, an app is not necessary. If you design a good website, your website can be used in a browser - even on an older phone with depleted battery capacity. Although there are mobile apps available for Lemmy, I have always been able to use it just fine in Fennec (F-droid packaged version of Firefox). Compared to Lemmy, Tildes is blazing fast in a mobile browser. The same goes for Mastodon, where I find the web interface to be superior to any app I have ever tried.

From a technical standpoint, the scope of the Lemmy project is much larger than Tildes. Tildes was started by a (understandably) disgruntled Reddit admin who wanted to raise the quality of discourse. Lemmy was started by a couple communists who wanted to create a tool which allows internet communities to have a shred of autonomy. To me, it seems much more practical to build tooling on top of Lemmy than Tildes (I say this with no disrespect to Tildes. I was around when it launched, and have generally positive feelings about Deimorz. MUCH better feelings than some of the other Reddit clones).

The idea to do a Tildes app at this moment seems silly, but only a little more silly than doing a Lemmy app. These apps are neccessary for Reddit because Reddit is a giant steaming pile of shit. In my controversial opinion, doing this for the Fediverse is cargo-cult behavior. People are doing this because they are deeply programmed to believe social media platforms are deliberately designed to exploit them (no wonder why). Third party apps were used to wallpaper over the problems that these corporate platforms refused to fix, but with AGPL licensed federated platforms, we can fix the problems right at the source, or fork the project and run a better instance (but preferably work with upstream and improve the experience for everybody).

Nothing eliminates more nuance than viewing some of the broadest and most substantial social upheavals in world history through the lens of Great Man Theory. To write off the struggles and sacrifice of millions of people, their successes and their failures, and lay them at the feet of one man. To treat history like this is to believe that the vast majority of its participants are unthinking, uncritical beats of burden with a predisposition to subservience. (The same applies to contemporary “hate the government, not the people” discourse, in which we are to assume the majority of Chinese citizens are helpless, brainwashed victims of totalitarianism)

When you treat history like this, you open up a lot of convenient shortcuts for yourself. You can claim that the October revolution was a much needed intervention, but then drop it immediately after the honeymoon period is over with some hamstrung claim that Stalin was too stupid or too selfish to understand what Lenin was trying to accomplish, or maybe Lenin himself was too stupid to understand Marx and the whole project was doomed. Or that we would be living in fully automated luxury communism right now if Trotsky had taken power.

None of this discourse delves into the actual social or economic conditions involved, nor the theory and practices which emerged from the crucible of revolution. Most importantly, it never makes any attempt to LEARN from this history, so previous mistakes can be avoided, and so proven effective strategies can be developed further and incorporated into contemporary struggles. It is navel gazing bullshit which conveniently discards the whole thing. The only lesson you learn from this treatment of history is that revolution leads to dystopia and that we shouldn’t even bother. The takeaway we end up with is that the people who disintegrated the Third Reich and put the first humans into space were better off when they were a backwards feudal monarchy.

And today, among the English-speaking online left, any time somebody comes along and argues “You know what, maybe we shouldn’t stick the entire history of the USSR or the PRC into a furnace. There are some valuable lessons in here.” they get derided as a Tankie by some vote blue no matter who sicko. Lots of people throwing the word “authoritarian” around who have never had to confront the sharp end of the US state once in their lives.

Have fun putting words in people’s mouths and spreading rumors on Reddit.

If you ask a liberal what “tankie” means you will get a response that sounds a lot like if you ask a conservative what “woke” means. The two main developers are communists, trying to collectivize social media. It is very shocking. 🙄 They develop the software transparently, out in the open, along with many other contributors. They also operate lemmy.ml, the very first Lemmy instance. Dessalines has a collection of essays he’s written on Github. If you are concerned about his beliefs, I would go straight to the source rather then taking third hand rumors on face value. As for the rest of the network, each instance (such as lemmy.world) is operated independently. The whole point of federation is to decentralize control over the network.

Some Fediverse platforms (e.g. Mastodon) allow you to migrate your account from one server to another. By doing this, you keep your account details, post history, subscriptions, etc. and your followers get redirected to your new account. Lemmy does not currently support this, but it may someday.