As you can see from the screenshot, we have been the top community on Lemmygrad for this month. This is likely due to the sudden influx of users following the Reddit ban. However, as time goes on, I would expect this to fluctuate again as the new Lemmy users find their way across this platform and gain more familiarity with different communities on the Lemmyverse.

With this likely upcoming change in mind, I created this post after I had this conversation right here, where some users pointed out the difference in reach between Reddit and Lemmygrad.

On the old sub, we had an automod (preprogrammed responses) that provided short answers to the same frequently asked questions that we have all seen many times. For example, typing !holodomor would trigger an automod reply with a short introduction and additional links and information for further reading on the topic.

Example of automod reply for !holodomor

The Holodomor

Marxists do not deny that a famine happened in the Soviet Union in 1932. In fact, even the Soviet archive confirms this. What we do contest is the idea that this famine was man-made or that there was a genocide against the Ukrainian people. This idea of the subjugation of the Soviet Union’s own people was developed by Nazi Germany, in order to show the world the terror of the “Jewish communists.”

• Socialist Musings. (2017). Stop Spreading Nazi Propaganda: on Holodomor

There have been efforts by anti-Communists and Ukrainian nationalists to frame the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 as “The Holodomor” (lit. “to kill by starvation” in Ukrainian). Framing it this way serves two purposes:

1. It implies the famine targeted Ukraine.
2. It implies the famine was intentional.

The argument goes that because it was intentional and because it mainly targeted Ukraine that it was, therefore, an act of genocide. This framing was originally used by Nazis to drive a wedge between the Ukrainian SSR (UkSSR) and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). In the wake of the 2004 Orange Revolution, this narrative has regained popularity and serves the nationalistic goal of strengthening Ukrainian identity and asserting the country’s independence from Russia.

Additional Resourcs:

• Soviet Famine of 1932: An Overview | The Marxist Project (2020)
• Did Stalin Continue to Export Grain as Ukraine Starved? | Hakim (2017) Archive
• The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933 | Davies and Wheatcroft (2004)
• The “Holodomor” explained | TheFinnishBolshevik (2020)

While such automod responses were very useful on a platform like Reddit (where all sorts of users might get recommended the subreddit or a particularly popular post among their suggestions), those automod responses are less relevant on Lemmygrad itself because of its nature (an openly Marxist-Leninist forum with a registration procedure) and its defederation from other instances (defederation simply means other instances are no longer allowed to interact with/view content of Lemmygrad itself).

Lemmygrad has already defederated from more reactionary, liberal or “apolitical” instances. To my knowledge, these are all the instances that do not allow Lemmygrad to interact with their own instances:

• lemmy.dbzer0.com, lemmy.world, feddit.de, sh.itjust.works, lemmy.blahaj.zone, midwest.social, lemmings.world, szmer.info, astraea.pink, feddit.org, feddit.kyiv.ua.

I got the above list from here, where you can read some of the instances’ own “reasoning” for defederating from Lemmygrad…

TLDR from here ↓

So, while Lemmygrad is clearly a safe space for Marxist discussion where there is less harassment from anti communists, this comes with limited reach outside Marxist communities and posts/comments from Lemmygrad will not appear on those instances, limiting cross-instance visibility.

This is not necessarily a drawback, of course. For example, from my point of view, being on a platform like Lemmygrad involves fewer daily actions required as a mod than I had to perform on Reddit. But if you are one of the users that joined more recently, you might see it differently. So it really depends.

That is why I am opening this discussion, to hear more opinions from the very same users that interact with this community.

Do you see Lemmygrad primarily as a great space for studying theory among fellow communists and building solidarity in a protected space? Or maybe you think the Deprogram is more about outreach and engaging with a broader leftist audience (including those not yet Marxist)? Or maybe something else entirely?

Feel free to express your thoughts and opinions on this, so that we can have a better understanding of the type of user that interact with this community.