Covert propagandists, people who belong to one of many (or multiple) subcultures and online or real life communities, who talk about their subject and micro-dose beliefs and ideology into their content as a way to begin the entry into the pipeline. They don’t make politics their primary topics to discuss, it’s secondary to their hobby or niche as a way to begin radicalization. Once the algorithm picks up on left-wing talking points or positions, it will begin feeding more left-wing content to their audience. 

We all need to be, to some extent, covert propagandists at a minimum.

Fantastic article! I already agree with federated, explicitly leftist spaces as our base, but one thing I see under-mentioned is the necessity of engaging with reactionary-controlled spaces to agitate and bring people over to our spaces. We need to be on Reddit to bring people to Lemmy. We need to be on Lemmy.ml to bring people from Lemmy.world and the like to places like Lemmygrad.ml and Hexbear.net. We need to be on Twitter to bring people to Mastadon.

One thing I really think is helpful is agitating not just on Reddit, for example, but on Lemmy.ml in areas where radicalized liberals can see it. It's why I host my intro ML reading list there, and do all of my agitation there. I have recieved DMs from users thanking me for continuously pushing the ML perspective and helping change their minds, so I know it works.

At the same time, the areas we control, such as Lemmygrad.ml, need to be developed spaces that are easy to transition people to. Introductory reading guides, helpful FAQs, and more are already great exampled we do. We need to continue fostering our communities here so that we have spaces to bring people.

All in all, excellent article, well done comrade!

commenting to boost/bump + so i can find this post more easily later (saved as well of course)

this has been a long time coming for sure. this is a tad dramatic to say but watching the internet i grew up with being dragged around as a rotted, empty beaten-dead-horse-corpse is very upsetting and disturbing. but I need to find it in me to work hard and turn that emotion into the fuel needed to collect and (re)distribute resources

I've been saying this for a long time as well. All the tools are available for us. We have a few issues I think:

• Networking
• Administration
• Ease of access

Networking

We need to built a network (read webring or similar) of leftist sites. We need to take a Popular Front approach to this work. Connecting groups via our shared core goals regardless of our ideological differences. This way, that list of shared sites is more easily and readily accessible. Remember, Google Search isn't going to turn up these sites on a query most of the time. So building a network of sites is key to discovery. This could also work as a kind of federation group.

Administration

We need to foster a cadre of technical minded comrades as well as community minded comrades to build these sites. This is a dual issue that needs to be worked out in unison, because these sites need to be stable. Not just in terms of uptime but also in its community. A site which is wither up and down often, or unmoderated and full of wreckers does us nothing and will make this task more difficult for everyone. We have a dedicated person on the team at Hexbear maintaining our UI fork for example. Its unclear of we have a backup plan for a "hit by a bus" scenario here. So we must ensure open communication with the wider administrative community but also find ways to educate and train more like minded technical comrades and community builders. Likewise we need to be involved as much as we can in contributing to projects to ensure they suite our needs and to ensure their continued development.

Ease of Access

Lastly, we should be collecting and collaborating together on how to make the setup and management of these sites as easy as we can for future operators. Hosting things like Lemmy, Matrix, Mastodon, etc, is no simple task at times. This goes hand in hand with Administration. Part of being a good administrator is having good documentation. Many of these services have decent documentation, but it could be better. So as part of ensuring ease of access we should be collecting:

• guides on configuring popular services.
• docker configurations for easy spin up.
• write-ups on various services to run, their maintenance complexity, and ease of administration.
• an authoritative list of queer/leftist software to investigate.

We should also be evaluating the underlying tech stack as well and providing guidance on things like: what hosting sites to use, What domain registrars to use, How to host out of your house, etc.

If we want this network to grow; if we want it to be the safe harbor for users who will be driven off mainstream social media, we have to make that process easier for people. With the_deprogram kicked off reddit, I wonder if they would have taken the option of building their own site if we had materials ready to ease them into that process.

i mean, this has lots of sense...that's why i left most of my accounts on traditional websites. now i'm in mastodon and lemmygrad, and i use linux and most free software that i can

-Non-Federated, Left-Wing Sites

• TankieTube, Communist YouTube

Thanks for the mention!

TankieTube is a PeerTube instance, so it belongs in the federated column IMO (albeit its current network is small).

That has been my position for a while: that we should settle our main accounts and activities on independent social media particularly the fediverse and use main-stream social medias as a way to reach out for more peoples.

I also think we should adjust our communication: debunking the propaganda about AES and historical communist theorists and leaders is good, but we do it so much that we barely talk about Marxist economic theory and philosophy. When trying to win over peoples in the process of getting radicalized, we should first talk about things like how the bourgeoisie is stealing the worker's surplus value and how that fact plus the competition and need for perpetual growth inevitably lead capitalism to fail, the rehabilitation of Stalin and Mao has to come after.

While I mostly agree with everyone you say, I still believe one has to meet the masses where they are found, and increasingly among younger people, this is on mainstream social media sites, so a little bit of both.