Reflections on Lemmygrad's growth after the Reddit ban

As you can see from the screenshot, we have been the top community on Lemmygrad for this month. This is likely due to the sudden influx of users following the Reddit ban. However, as time goes on, I would expect this to fluctuate again as the new Lemmy users find their way across this platform and gain more familiarity with different communities on the Lemmyverse.

With this likely upcoming change in mind, I created this post after I had this conversation right here, where some users pointed out the difference in reach between Reddit and Lemmygrad.

On the old sub, we had an automod (preprogrammed responses) that provided short answers to the same frequently asked questions that we have all seen many times. For example, typing !holodomor would trigger an automod reply with a short introduction and additional links and information for further reading on the topic.

While such automod responses were very useful on a platform like Reddit (where all sorts of users might get recommended the subreddit or a particularly popular post among their suggestions), those automod responses are less relevant on Lemmygrad itself because of its nature (an openly Marxist-Leninist forum with a registration procedure) and its defederation from other instances (defederation simply means other instances are no longer allowed to interact with/view content of Lemmygrad itself).

Lemmygrad has already defederated from more reactionary, liberal or "apolitical" instances. To my knowledge, these are all the instances that do not allow Lemmygrad to interact with their own instances:

• lemmy.dbzer0.com, lemmy.world, feddit.de, sh.itjust.works, lemmy.blahaj.zone, midwest.social, lemmings.world, szmer.info, astraea.pink, feddit.org, feddit.kyiv.ua.

I got the above list from here, where you can read some of the instances' own "reasoning" for defederating from Lemmygrad...

TLDR from here ↓

So, while Lemmygrad is clearly a safe space for Marxist discussion where there is less harassment from anti communists, this comes with limited reach outside Marxist communities and posts/comments from Lemmygrad will not appear on those instances, limiting cross-instance visibility.

This is not necessarily a drawback, of course. For example, from my point of view, being on a platform like Lemmygrad involves fewer daily actions required as a mod than I had to perform on Reddit. But if you are one of the users that joined more recently, you might see it differently. So it really depends.

That is why I am opening this discussion, to hear more opinions from the very same users that interact with this community.

Do you see Lemmygrad primarily as a great space for studying theory among fellow communists and building solidarity in a protected space? Or maybe you think the Deprogram is more about outreach and engaging with a broader leftist audience (including those not yet Marxist)? Or maybe something else entirely?

Feel free to express your thoughts and opinions on this, so that we can have a better understanding of the type of user that interact with this community.