can i remind you all what this place is? it’s a website that spawned from a subreddit about a podcast. that is it. and we still have so many people in the streets!!! im ready to bet that this 10k niche community has more people organizing and shit than most fucking subreddits 20 times bigger than us. cos that’s wha we are, at the end of the day, a fucking subreddit. dont get me wrong, i love this place, but really, is this where you are expecting some great movement to start? we dont have offices, we dont have any type of local unity, we barely pay the mods of this place 400 dollars a month, we are just a bunch of dumbasses sharing memes and newspaper articles on a website.
and the thing is, there is a fuckton of people here in comparison to other places; now, im talking about the subreddit that had 12 times more people at the time of the ban, but we had a huge fucking part of our community volounteer and donate for Bernie, which ok, pretty cringe in retrospect, but we still mobilized quite a lot. but we still have people daily talking about helping the homeless, organizing communities, joining RAs, and all the jazz, something you just dont see anywhere else.
and also, jesus, some people simply cant or wont organize. that’s it. you cant force those. so just let them have a place to post, talk about topics, get informed and chill out. i personally have way too much anxiety and i am not even sure of what to do in my own country that counts as organizing, so i use this place to rant about my life sometimes, something i wouldnt be able to do if this place was, idk, the DSA or something. idk what the DSA is actually. uh. will this bring any leftist project into actuation? no, and we are all painfully aware of that, and we tell off anyone who thinks otherwise. but so far, we have loads of people who organize, to the point where it is actually commendable, instead of shaming the empty half of the bottle.
Not only that but online organizing in this space is a surefire way to wind up with a CIA honeypot or get doxxed
We should have a thread to discuss implementing measures to mitigate this. Definitely a huge concern, as much as I would love to use a place like this to organize.
It’s not gonna happen. If that is a goal, it needs to be completely locked down and each user would need to go through extensive vetting, which is a ton of work.
From what little I know, it’s best to not organize online at all because the amount of hoops you have to jump through to do it safely aren’t worth it when that time could be spent in real life spaces.
I agree with your premise, but I think we’re envisioning different things when referring to organizing online.
I’m not talking about “hey comrades, I’m hosting a communism at X location on Wednesday”, but rather online organization that can possibly be done pseudo-anonymously. While I definitely don’t consider posting to be praxis, I’d consider the creation of this forum (more specifically Lemmy) to be along those lines.
I realize the most effective organization is going to be offline, but there’s definitely a huge space for digital organization. There’s a huge opportunity to dislodge capitalist tech companies by creating FOSS and decentralized alternatives to services like Uber/Airbnb.
But thinking ahead to the not-so-distant future, what are we going to do about the proliferation of facial recognition and the likes? Within the next decade, your location will be tied to your name and face just by walking about any moderately populated area. At some point not too long from now, organizing online may be the only way to do so without institutional surveillance (provided you have decent internet opsec). I’m reluctant to dismiss all digital organization outright for this reason.
Agreed. Encouraging people to organize and do praxis is good. Incessantly bitching, complaining, and shaming about how there are 10,000 people on the site and not all of them are actually doing real-world activism is not.
I’m a Socialist. Yes, I probably should be putting more effort into radicalizing people I know IRL, unionizing my workplace, going to more protests. But also, I’m a lazy piece of shit and I’m not going to do any of that, for the foreseeable future at least.
Any energy spent browbeating people for sitting in front of a computer wasting their life would be better spent building a path to activism. It’s easy to say “You should be doing more”, but while it might make you feel better, it doesn’t actually result in people doing more. It’s harder to put in the work of convincing people to do more, and removing barriers to people doing more.
A moderator team that generates a feeling of superiority over their userbase because they’re doing more “praxis” than average can only really devolve into said moderator team eventually dissolving the community and telling everyone to “go outside”, as if the actual result of such an action wouldn’t just be the unmotivated userbase moving onto other websites where they can be lazy fuckers, while destroying a centralized left-wing community that could have been used as a pool for radicalization and recruitment.