YOU are speaking!
As many are aware, there has been a lot of site drama in the past week or so. This is NOT a post to discuss that, and I ask that you keep all serious discussion about it on the pinned posts it belongs in. What I am looking to do here is ask the community what they would like to see from c/agitprop going forward.
There have been ongoing discussions on Hexbear regarding making more serious posts, having a place for effortposting to get noticed (and thus incentivizing more to be made, nobody likes spending hours working on en effortpost for 5 upbears), and having a more focused place for less casual/more academic discussion. The nature of this comm, or at least what the intended purpose was supposed to be upon its inception, was to give Hexbear users a place to produce and find agitprop for use in everyday discussions. Given these two statements, last week I made an impromptu U.S. Election response/commentary resource Megathread here on c/agitprop. I figured that perhaps this was the place to open up to users for less casual/more serious analysis and discussion regarding the U.S. election, like… for actual traditional agitprop purposes.
The post was a huge success, and the community received tons of high-effort posting from individuals into the Megathread posting their own takes on the U.S. election, many references and direct links to highlight other Hexbear user’s great effortposts elsewhere on this site, and good resources from outside of Hexbear. In my opinion, this post/style of post could be a useful and engaging format for effortpost generation/congregation of larger news events in the future.
Now finally for the purpose of this post: What would you like to see from c/agitprop going forward? Feedback on the U.S. Election response/commentary resource Megathread is of course appreciated, and I’d love to hear any ideas regarding how it went/if you (dis)liked it/holding a similar thread in the future, but please do not limit your input based only on what you have seen so far from this comm. This community is, of course, only what we make it, so any and all feedback is greatly appreciated and goes a long way towards improving everybody’s user experience.
Below I will list a few ideas I have seen floated by the community for c/agitprop in the past. Additionally, I will try to keep this list updated with any ideas that are provided in the comments of this post as well in order to highlight them for discussion.
•Effortpost Megathread for larger news events (frequency/guidelines for “larger” TBD here)
•Agitprop Megathread running parallel to the Weekly News Megathread for more nuanced discussion/analysis to be used both on Hexbear and elsewhere
•Ongoing Agitprop workshop/resource thread to organize the Hexbear community’s many skills and have relevant, ready-to-go agitprop for current events ready for dissemination outside of this site
•Reference guide for left/left-adjacent spaces to crosspost agitprop material to
•Agitprop field report for returning to Hexbear (potentially contest style) and seeing where agitprop is reaching the widest audience and receiving the most engagement
•”Quick Draw” style + up to date archive of good agitprop in order to quickly debunk common talking points
•Keeping a calendar of known upcoming events to help prepare agitprop ahead of time
•Highlighting past major events or public figures to conduct a postmortem effortpost analysis
I think part of agitated propaganda should include calls to action. I'm not saying we should be running and operating our own events, but we should have something to direct people to as well. We should maintain a working list of organizations (and not just the big ones) by location (country/state or provinces or territories/city). Something similar to this: https://hexbear.net/post/8930
Much of that list is Food Banks and Homeless Shelters, I think we can work on expanding it and directing people to things like Food Not Bombs (which is noted in the body of the post), women's shelters, and any other mutual aid programs we can find in these localities. The direction shouldn't be to simply donate money for food, but to encourage people to donate their labor.
Adjacent to that, we should curate a list of online social spaces where this content can be distributed. Reddit has a community for many localities (at least in the US and probably Canada), there are likely locality specific comms on the wider lemmyNet as well.
To encourage the creation of these types of AgitProp we should encourage agitprop "battles" not unlike "r/photoshopbattles" on reddit, an "AgitBattle" if you will. These posts should contain a topic with information that can be used to create the AgitProp, subjects should start with [AgitBattle]. Here is a good example of what I mean: Literacy Statistics 2024-2025 (Where we are now) by the National Literacy Institute. The information on this page can be easily transformed into agitprop, let's see what people come up with. It might be useful to also include a leaping off point, maybe a photo or image that needs to be incorporated into the AgitProp.
These kinds of posts should help with getting the creative energy flowing. Friendly "competition" that will likely encourage critique and improvement by the creators and consumers.
To complement posts like this, it might be beneficial to have a weekly brainstorming mega thread that encourages users to collect these AgitProp subjects and themes. If something interesting comes out of those threads, encourage folks to create a AgitBattle thread relating to that subject or theme.
This should help us cultivate a culture of both "theory" and "practice" which we can use to sharpen our skills. I would also say it's important to report back if any of the content being generated by this community appears to be effective. A kind of "field report" or "after action" report if you will. If content was posted on a publicly accessible site, link to the post, so that others can read the reactions and we can collectively assess its effectiveness.
All good ideas. I think we certainly have the ability to organize non-online action without risking being doxxed or something of the like. Standing good causes like food banks and Zapatista coffee, etc. are all good ideas. We could probably even boost the net amount of aid delivered by dropping a weekly aid request for very simple things like orderable refreshments for strikers on a picket line, which go a very long way and majorly boost morale, though I feel that this is something that belongs more in c/mutual_aid, especially with the part about trying to organize Hexbears to contribute actual labor.
An agitprop crossposting reference is definitely something we should consider. It would be easy to compile a list of left/left-adjacent communities to make sure Hexbear posts get delivered there in higher numbers.
A current events thread running parallel to the news Megathread should also be considered. Agitprop’s effectiveness really drops off if it isn’t being seen when these issues are being discussed in the first place and people are starting to form opinions.
I think your final two points can be combined to work more effectively. The “contest” can essentially be who has taking agitprop content from Hexbear and gotten the most engagement on it elsewhere, which also acts as a report back on its effectiveness and encourages spread of agitprop to wider reaching communities.
To expand on my thoughts a little here: I imagined the target audience for the agitprop created here on this site would be people outside the site. I imagined we're agitated enough 😏 lol. My thoughts were more centered on creating Agitprop that can motivate the politically unmotivated / disillusioned. Like, creating tailored agitprop for the r/somethingiswrong2024 people, or for the r/antiwork or r/latestagecapitalism communities. Targeting places like r/florida with agitprop centered around the disaffected groups within Florida (women, queer people, etc.) and attempting to use that agitprop to direct them to these localized support networks, or even encouraging them to create support networks of their own. So not necessarily Hexbearians being mobilized to contribute their labor, but the frequently online liberal progressives who need that push into more leftist spaces. After reading a lot of content in r/somethingiswrong2024 I just have this sense that there is a group of people out there looking for anything to hold onto, and if we can direct them in some way to these local places, they'll fill that void and maybe work agacent to more leftists.
That is a very specific kind of agit prop campaign I would say, so obviously, we should also be creating more generalized agitprop as well that would work in places like r/antiwork and r/latestagepropaganda. Antiwork had a post recently that was linked here where there were a lot of "Maybe communism isn't as bad as I've been told" sentiments with many upvotes. So I think you're right about keeping things current. So, in line with those adjacent communities, it might be valuable to write up (given enough time) an effective guideline or guidebook for agitation in those spaces. What works, what doesn't, what themes resonate with the communities, how reactionary are they etc.
In the case of "local" agitation (r/state_name), the more targeted the agitprop is, the more effective the message is. If the message is "the 1% are going to kill us all" well, yeah, I think people would see that and agree, and that would be it. If the message was "Floridians! The 1% are trying to destroy your communities, build them up where they won't! Join {{local aid network}} today!"
This is basically a stream of consciousness at this point and not really well-organized thoughts haha. I think you get where I'm coming from, though.
I think that this then would fall under the points you made earlier about keeping a list of spaces we are actively working on spreading agitprop material, and then having reports back on how they went
It's a real shame Lemmy doesn't have a built-in Wiki like reddit, we could really benefit from a wiki, I think.
I also think wikis are a big missing feature compared to reddit.
However until such a feature is added there are various sources of free wikis such as code forges, miraheze.org, riseup.net etc. And if there's flexibility about the software (not a wiki but another format) many more.
But going to another website, having to create a separate account, then someone has to manage all that, is a lot more work than having it integrated.
Totally. I think some instances have integrated dokuwiki to allow authentication via Lemmy. However its still a work in progress I think.
looking at the repo issues, I see there is just activity 6-12 months ago... so either they got it functional enough for now, or gave up. I am guessing it works given https://wiki.slrpnk.net/
Yeah I think they regularly use it.
I don't know enough about lemmy admining to tell if the instructions provided are trivial to implement or a big messy side project.
Why doesn't every instance have this....?
Also the requirement of a email is interesting, I wonder if it needs to be valid. If not I'd tell folks to maybe use their instance handle as the email.
I think it's probably a kind of hack to get working and its a lot more to maintain too. Its rad that they did it bit it really looks like a hack.
cooooool!