They have a fairly good thing going there in terms of general energy and number of people on board but Reddit and lib mods could ruin it very fast. It also seems like we have a fair bit of exchange with them, even if a lot of us get banned. Do we want to make a liferaft comm /c/antiwork for the dual purpose of growing hexbear and providing a space where a sane and correct model of antiwork with leftist foundations can grow?
Weigh in with pros and cons below.
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I think it's too soon, while the very notion of antiwork is a thorn in the side of capital they don't really have anything on them; they banned cth because of "brigading" and "calls for violence", but antiwork hasn't really engaged in any activism beyond posting convos with their shitty bosses. You'll know when a sub is about to be nuked when they start to quarantine it, pin mod posts that call for users to behave in a certain way, have automods pre-empting bad bahavior on every new thread, etc. Also, if we are to start lifeboating a new space, we'd have to advertise hexbear aggressively, and I think that's counterproductive at this juncture.
I don't think it would work if the sub is banned, the ideological distance between us would cause too many clashes with such a big new community. This isn't very relevant, though, because the sub probably isn't about to be banned. What we should be thinking about is the scenario where the sub starts purging "tankies" (anyone who isn't a mild reformist), which is fairly likely. I don't know whether a liferaft community or just active recruiting is the best option if that happens, though.
What if I told you people on there probably don’t like ‘tankies’ not because they’re diametrically opposed to their ideology but because they’re unfunny nerds who want to hijack a shitpost with texbook shit.
People on there don't like "tankies" because they're :reddit-logo: liberals with no understanding of AES. It's got nothing to do with a few unfunny posts that may or may not have been made on a subreddit.
It would be better to agitate there while it's still around. As much as I think new users would be wonderful, bringing in a deluge of people who want an exact replica of the space they lost isn't going to work out. If anything, peeling off like-minded posters would probably be more to our benefit.
It's good and correct to post agitprop in places where class-consciousness is forming.
For real, I'm excited for the day when we do stuff like brake light repairs under a red banner or community gardens and child care under an explicit communist flag. Or when we can start community soviet-style councils. Right now my org is so anemic, feels like they can't do much but distribute literature at protests or gather once a month to talk about theory...
Yeah we did that once and it's been pretty widely regarded as a bad move
It does have a lot of :LIB:s with no understanding of imperialism, though. I think it's important to be careful, the average opinion on there doesn't fit well with here. We don't want to suddenly bring in thousands of liberals for the mods to deal with.
Considering there was never any self-crit from the people who engineered it, that's definitely not a given
No, because a lot of the people who spearheaded that are openly still here. It's not a secret or anything
There was a lot of mod chaos, so I don't blame you for thinking so. Some people left, some left and came back either still as mods or regular users, a lot of people who got banned got unbanned later. It's also tricky because it was never openly stated who was responsible for it IIRC, so you just have to go by people's statements during the debacle
I think there should have been way more transparency about everything that went down, but I do understand the impulse to just slam the lid closed on the whole mess. But if you ask me, it's still just bubbling under the surface
They did make a statement , but it's weird how much people sometimes still obsess over it.
I'm assuming you're talking about /c/okbuddycapitalist - what happened? I didn't know anything went wrong with that, it looks like their mod team recommends us and everything.
for the last time, no. We are not robust enough to swallow a sub larger than our entire site. Perhaps set up a lemmy instance for them and keep tabs on them there, but we are not in a position to absorb them. Most of them are libs, we would be under a deluge of anti-tankie posts from the word go. try to entice a few who seem more advanced in ideology, but we are not here to absorb old reddit subs.
I, too, look forward to the next 16 reposts of this exact question.
I get why people are wondering it, but yeah, IMO it's not a good idea.
It's an actively self-destructive idea, it's built on unfounded optimism over anti-work sentiment rising while ignoring that it right now has no guiding ideology. :lenin-sleeping: please wake up and remind us why this is bad.
Just seriously vet what you're actually bringing in in terms of mods and culture. Just cause it's banned from reddit doesn't mean it's good
I think it's a good idea but the sub would have to pop off significantly more before the admins will close it. We'd do better to keep pushing the agitprop there than trying to siphon them off to come here atm
The solution IMO is for someone to take the initiative in setting up a Lemmy or Hexbear (or Postmill) instance and handing over control to a trusted member of that community. Or even better, walking a trusted member of that community through the process. When we first got banned, we looked to Raddle as a potential place to settle, but the difference in culture and community leadership would have made for a miserable outcome. When VCJ got banned, they looked to us as a potential place to settle and the same thing happened. What's best for them and what's best for us is independence and autonomy.
they evidently aren't anti-sectarian since they ban anything vaguely marxist
That's not entirely accurate from what I've seen, they've just been clamping down on anyone who posts too much.
It is a lot of work. It will require an organizing initiative which can recruit at least a dozen volunteers to deal with the underlying infrastructure and maintenance, not including community moderators and the street team. But that's what it takes. That's what it took to make this place.
While we (and Lemmygrad) can certainly accommodate some refugees, we're talking about an 800,000 user forum here. We simply don't have the volunteers or resources to accommodate that kind of influx. On the other hand, within a community of that size, the expertise and the labor power is certainly present. We should take the Maoist approach of organizing them into a self-sufficient revolutionary unit, channeling that expertise and power. At least, that's my take. I'm just some guy.
VCJ was one of the worst things to happen here and the amount of people that haven’t learnt anything from it is surprising.
Every time this site has tried to do a lifeboat comm, it pretty much immediately got sabotaged by wreckers and a struggle session mysteriously consumes the entire site. Easy wedge is claiming a comm's mods are the same as the sitemods and concern trolling when the comm has extra rules.
I 've had fun sitting on the sidelines of those trash fires like :popcorn-time:, but you can see the toll it took on the sitemods and devs. Last six months or whatever have been chill enough I finally made an account to hang out. Feels like the mods learned, but who knows, maybe I just haven't gotten banned yet.
r/antiwork would be better off making their own instance of hexbear or lemmy imo. We've all got thicker skin after a year of this shit and it's less of a target on their backs.
We should definitely make a comm for antiwork so that I can have a place to rant about how much I hate my job every day.
Some people here are worried that hexbear is going to become overwhelmed by reddit libs if we make lifeboat subs but there's no need to worry that's ever going to happen.
This website has a specific culture that's basically unpenetrable to anyone other than terminally online leftists. That can be a blessing or a curse, depends on how you look at it. I think the current vibe of the site is nice but it would be good if there was a slow influx of new users.
