They don’t. Not anymore, at least, if that was a thing. I’ve been mentioning the Fediverse there for years. Comments generally get reasonably high views, but low engagement because people on established platforms rarely want to do anything to fix their issues.
Those of us still with active Reddit accounts, now might be a good time to gently encourage people on Reddit to check out the Fediverse. Suggest your favourite Fediverse website by URL (don’t just say “Lemmy” or something; we know people trip over themselves to hate on the whole choosing a website thing).
I don’t know if it’s a good idea or a bad idea to mention the state of smaller or niche communities, but it feels more honest to me to just say that we could use more people here who are willing to build an alternative, and not just scroll one.
Fediverse severs have a bit of a natural size limit, which means site-level moderation is easier. Admins also aren’t motivated by ad impressions or vanity metrics that impress investors, so there’s that, too.
It doesn’t remove bad actors, of course, and there will be no lack of bad admins, but it’s still more friction than exists on corporate sits.
Anyone who still has an account there, I’d encourage you to use it to gently promote your favourite Fediverse website. There are a significant number of people asking about Reddit alternatives the last couple of days, and sending people directly to a specific suggested site (rather than just saying something like “Lemmy”) is more likely to get people to come over and check things out.
It’s a shame there’s not some big social engagement event going on here right now. Anyone want to start some kind of viral shitpostery?
It took the outright fascists 50 years to solidify control over the functions of state. They organized, took over mass media, took over the churches, redefined the terms of debate and engagement, and leveraged the angst of generations and the white supremacy latent in the culture to create a reliable voting block out of single issue voters.
The same has to happen on the left. We need to find where the people are, undertand their needs and desires, and sell them on solutions that feel good, and that make sense to them, while also being genuinely pro-social and pro-worker. We need our own communication and media platforms that don’t allow the technofascists from blocking our messages. We need to get people off of corporate social media and into spaces we can actually reach them, and we need to do it without actively pissing them off and getting them frustrated with us.
And we need to embed ourselves mainstream political parties. We need the more moderate, more socially acceptable of us to be on internal political party committees, to run for office, and to sell our ideals. Possibly without ever mentioning the “C” or “S” words. And we need a spillover party that both collects the more radical and, uh, grating members of the movement, and to promote more radical ideas and positions, providing an ideological anchor for the comrades in the mainstream parties, making them look more reasonable.
Now is the opportunity to make moves. The working class is angry at the right. Collect them now. Pull them away from their echo chambers, and from technofascist websites, and redirect their anger. Bring them here. Give them someplace new to feel a sense of community and belonging. Send out leaflets and newsletters. Create an alternate media ecosystem that laughs at the messages of individualims and exceptionalism.