Yea, been thinking about doing it recently.
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!
CTH is more like a general-purpose comm on Hexbear, the podcast isn't really discussed much, plus the megathreads are where a lot of the activity is. Since instances are relatively small, a lot of people scroll by new or active, meaning comms can go months without a post yet gain a ton of traction. It's like a sorting bucket more than an active community. For Hexbear, as an example, c/slop is pretty popular, and c/games is a nice community, it all depends on what people want to post.
The way to strengthen Lemmygrad is to use it, posting and commenting. It already does what it needs to do, and since there isn't a profit-motive, growth isn't the goal.
One thing about Lemmy is that instances are more like subreddits, and communities are more like hashtags. Having one or two study threads per week is about the max an instance can realistically field while maintaining active discussion.
There was one, I believe it stalled out due to lack of participation. Over on Hexbear we have a mostly stalled-out Capital reading thread that just started volume 3 (I'm catching up from the last third of volume 2) and a currently very successful reading thread centering imperialism, currently mid-way through Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
Perhaps it might be worth revisiting Grad's reading group now that there's an influx from the Deprogram.
At a personal level, I do share this intro ML reading list I made over on Lemmy.ml, but there's no reading thread for it, it's just my own thing.
Extremely disappointing. As others have said, hopefully they go the way of Cuba and correct this dramatic error.
I'll have to think about it! I'm extremely busy lately, and have recently begun org work IRL on top of that, so my hands are pretty full at the moment, but I'll keep it in mind!