On one hand, I initially thought it was odd and insincere to contrast (what I assume is) state-made propaganda with commercial ads. In my state, the state-funded media channels are infamous for being far more progressive than commercial channels. The state-made stuff has an official authority to it.

But on the other hand, commercial ads are far more pervasive than state-made propaganda in my society. State-made stuff are basically just announcements, with occasional social campaigns about drink-driving, smoking and domestic violence, or maybe the military giving STEM ads aimed at women. The state channels can barely compete with ads and capital news, so perhaps it is fair to treat them as the primary face of media under capitalism.

most western states (and, in fact, most states) don’t suppress discourse as much as the USSR often did

This is hard to say outright just because of variation between and even within western states (I’ve seen very petty arrests over discourse in my state), but overall I agree, yes.

I also think it’s important to understand why it was the case. Western countries all have a similar media landscape so I propose the propaganda model described in the book Manufacturing Consent applies generally to them. The result of those filters being, the loudest voices are those of state (relevant former-CIA interview!) and commercial interests (in the US, mass media it’s almost all subsidiaries of Comcast, TimeWarner, Disney, News Corp, NA and Sony at this point), which may clash, but rarely ever enough to threaten the state or the status quo - the state treats the biggest companies well. Major news broadcasters aren’t promoting major change even when they criticize a government or leader, they usually just say ‘vote for the other liberal politician!’. The discourse is generally so tame, within the bounds of simple policy and culture changes, rather than threatening the state, so it doesn’t really need to be suppressed by the state. But when it does (see Jan 6, or laws about threatening the president at all), we start seeing the limits of where discourse is allowed.

In my understanding, USSR didn’t have as much luxury there. The people with the most money, rather than those with the least, have an interest in fighting the state and allowing them to have the freedom to use their money freely to gain power. So discourse which threatens the state will probably be a bit more scary to the leadership. I don’t think it’s a good thing (for example, it reminds me of news I saw of China’s state suppression of Maoist protesters, which comes off to me as fragile and repressive) but I understand why they don’t give as much liberty as the well-established propaganda model of the USA.

There’s also something to be said about the suppression of discourse that our economic system implies, rather than the state suppressing it. See this clip of filmmaker George Lucas talking about freedoms in film art wrt USSR and USA. Obviously I’m not suggesting the inability to publish art is the same as being arrested by a state, obviously not! Rather, I want to highlight that one can’t just point to state policy to compare the freedom of discourse.___

It’s less a dogwhistle and more just explicit symbolism, just substituting the swastika so that it’s not a swastika.

Agreed. To say ‘we are revisionists because we revise’ is ultimately a semantic gotcha which ignores the history and context of an established term. Of course we revise, how else would we add all these other names onto “Marxism-” in the first place!

For me “left” is just a relative term

Not just for you, it literally is a relative term. It means nothing without context.

This was interesting. I know two of the small communist sites I use are hosted on these services so it’s good to know how stable the ground is.

wow the /c/greentext community has posts that remind you of 4chan

:0

If it has four legs, they’re gonna try and kill it.

The reputational damage is a good point, its extent is kind of lost on me as I’m not very involved in the wiki circles but obviously this is gonna hurt it and isn’t easy to scrub off as the vandal banned ProleWiki users like you, Forte and OP, doing so as a supposed authority of Leftypedia.

Since Aussig and Parabola are banned, I doubt Leftypedia would stand up again.

Aussig, apart from whatever they did on the discord, was pretty irrelevant to the actual wiki. Account created April 30, made a dozen edits, then for whatever reason RedParabola promoted them. I don’t know if they’re a sockpuppet, or friends or negotiated something on discord, whatever, but they’re a “literally who?” before today.

As for Parabola, they made a bunch of contributions but the wiki won’t be much different without them, just a bit slower. It’s not like they were critical to the site. Like you and that admin said, probably Wisconcom anyway.

In my month staying in there, it is a gold mine of bullshit

I believe that. An archivism project I was in a while back was victim to petty discord drama causing two different coups and ending up getting the whole thing nuked. I can’t help but see it as a drama site for any project-based chat, attracting people who just want to climb to the top and become lords of tiny fiefs.

For what its worth, the leftypedia staff have just removed the discord server from their site, as being “no longer affiliated with Leftypedia users”. I’m not sure what to make of that since I stay away from discord like plague.

Looks like the site staff have banned Aussig and made an update post: https://wiki.leftypol.org/wiki/Leftypedia:Community_hub

edit: And disavowed the Discord server.

Maybe I can grift a nice bounty developing AR glasses which patch out all the brands on clothes and places in real-time.

If someone’s take on 9/11 doesn’t go back to at least the early 1980s, it’s probably not worth taking too seriously. It didn’t start on 9/11, that’s just the date millions of people were forced into hearing about the messy and complex conflicts. A witness on ground zero doesn’t become a 9/11 expert.

The 4th season of the podcast Blowback does an excellent job of covering the background, both within and beyond the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan. I highly recommend it.

It’s disingenuous to assume the Soviet Union is representative of communism or even the Western communist movement at the time or afterwards. It would be similar to pointing to the unique horrors of the United States history and claiming therefore all those supporting capitalism are disturbing.

Ah, I see what you mean. Yeah, that is a major issue.

An interesting part of it is that I’m not use how much of that is the service working as intended (even in abstract ways, like promoting interest-grabbing things) and how much is abuse of the service (basically SEO for social media posts, using botfarms to promote content, etc.). And just to be clear, it’s still a fault of the platform if it’s being abused by organized think-tanks and advertisers. Whereas in Lemmy and Mastodon, the openness and customisability would communities to adjust ‘the algorithm’ that decides which posts to promote, or just block things that are unwelcome in their community.

Ah, that sucks to hear about.

I’m not sure if that’s really how the US propaganda model works (that is, the one defined in Manufacturing Consent). It’s an element of it, you’re right about that, but I think ultimately the issue is that they’re a for-profit information platform. And, as a result of that and the system we’re in, they’re affected by at least four of the five filters of bias that the authors proposed:

• They’re filtered by the investor demands to censor.
• They’re filtered by advertising demands to censor.
• They’re vulnerable to mass-media flak against their reputation.
• They’re vulnerable to anti-[flavour-of-the-month] red-scare hysteria.

Mastodon, like Lemmy, can basically ignore the first two filters, and established communities which don’t mind being smaller than mainstream are unaffected by the remaining two.

Ultimately, it’s important to remember that BlueSky is a for-profit business, like Twitter, like reddit. I urge everyone to avoid it where possible, just like I would go back in time and urge people not to make Twitter a thing.

They will inevitably go down a similar path. Even in the best case hypothetical scenario, they are still beholden to the interests of shareholders and advertisers. They have to make money from you, or from rich companies, to survive. Mastodon instances, on the other hand, are scalable enough that they can sustain themselves off self-funding or donations. Just like Lemmy, they don’t have an intrinsic motivation to throw in ads, or to get you addicted to scrolling and arguing, or to censor communities that offend their sponsors.

It’s no co-incidence that you’re feeling some similarities between Lemmy and Mastodon, in fact Mastodon users can actually post here! ‘Fediverse’ programs all use the same language (protocol) to communicate and so some are able to interact. I’ve had a Lemmy<->Mastodon conversation before. Admittedly it’s not ideal to do that everyday, because of the obvious difference in formats, but having the ability to do that can be useful, especially if one service has a community that yours doesn’t.