Lemmygrad

Lemmygrad Type Online forum Troll farm Spam host Propaganda outlet Available in English Founded 17 August 2019 Founder Dessalines Key people Felipe Forte, CriticalResist, and others Users 7,700 registered accounts ~35 active users Espoused ideology Dengism URL lemmygrad.ml

Lemmygrad is a pro-China online forum founded in 2019. The site is based around free and open source software and is federated with similar forums. As of February 2023, the site claims to host nearly 40,000 posts and has over 10,000 active users at any given time, although these number are significantly exaggerated.

Lemmygrad is greatly notorious among the left for the ideological stances most dominate in its community. The moderators of the forum, along with most of the usership, adhere militantly to Dengist and other revisionist ideology. The majority of registered users on Lemmygrad, according to the administrators themselves, are currently banned from the site, largely for ideological reasons.

The development of revolutionary movements and ideology is rarely considered on this site, with its rhetoric largely entailing defense for so-called "actually existing socialism", most notably, modern China. Users which do not fulfill this ideological stance are almost always banned by the moderators. The moderation itself is commonly said to be plagued with poor and ad-hoc moderation policies, along with a plethora of "informal rules" which the moderators enforce.

The moderators of the forum openly tolerate and at times even endorse the raiding of ideological opposed sites (which commonly includes those owned by socialists) and virtual piracy.

History

Founding and early developments

Lemmygrad was founded in August 2019, with its first post being on the 17th of that month. Its initial moderator team and usership were largely composed of Dengists from various Telegram, Reddit, and Discord servers. However, other ideological groupings were provisionally allowed on the site as well.

Reddit "migration" to Lemmygrad

In March 2022, the self-declared Dengist subreddit GenZedong was quarantined on Reddit for its promotion of disinformation and war propaganda within the context of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, and seemingly threatened with an impended ban. Its accompanying communities of "GenZhou" (its "educational" outlet) and "GenZhukov" (its "military history and tactics" outlet) were banned for their usage in evading the quaratine for GenZedong users as well as their espousal of racism, terrorism, and disinformation.

The Lemmygrad moderators would react to this by self-promoting their project on the GenZedong subreddit and Discord server. With the futher assistance of the GenZedong administrators, this would prompt a so-called "migration" from Reddit to Lemmygrad in order to ensure that GenZedong users would be able to persist in their denialist and negationist content. Due to the size of GenZedong, Lemmygrad would temporally expand greatly. So much so, the moderators of Lemmygrad would soon refer to their forum as an "/r/genzedong replacement" and would admit that most of the activity of Lemmygrad took place with "migrated" GenZedong users on their site. However, this large-scale increase in site activity was only temporally. As the year 2022 progressed and the GenZedong subreddit remained unbanned, most GenZedong users in Lemmygrad would return to their original subreddit. By January 2023, there only existed only about 50 active users on Lemmygrad, including the moderation team.

Purported denial-of-service attacks

In March-to-May of 2022, Lemmygrad would allegedly suffer denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against it, taking down the site for a number of hours. While the moderators of Lemmygrad claimed the perpetrators of the supposed attacks to, concurrently, be liberals and fascists who were organized on anti-communist subreddits, this claim is impossible to prove, and this event is speculated as being a false-flag attack (accompanied with fabricated screenshots) by the moderators in order to provide justification for the massive ideological purges they would perform later in 2022 against non-Dengist groupings.

Later events

Lemmygrad, as it developed in mid-to-late 2022, woud experience notable ideological purges (commonly in the form of mass-bannings of ideological groupings on the site). These purges would result in most, if not all non-Third Worldist or anti-revisionist groupings being banned from the site.

Ideological purges

Purge of "Patriotic socialists" and "MAGA communists"

By 2022, an ideological conflict had developed relating to the presence of users under the persuasion of Patriotic socialism. While this resulted in a number of internal debates over the nature of Patriotic socialist ideology (particularly relating to if Patriotic socialists were to be permitted on Lemmygrad), the moderation of Lemmygrad soon became cognizant of the opportunity this presented — while the amount of "Patsocs" on Lemmygrad was relatively small, they would be able to frame all users who were not sympathetic to Third Worldist and pro-CPC ideology as "Patriotic socialists" and ban them, ensuring the persistance of an ideological orthodoxy on the site which would seldom be contested by non-revisionary Marxists (which was increasing the case, particularly after the creation of a Hoxhaism community). The Lemmygrad moderation, in pursuit of this idea to frame and mass purge non-Third Worldist elements, would form a secretive server on the platform Matrix in order to execute their plot.

Creation of "Lemmygrad.com" and purge

One of the first acts of the moderators' plot was to conduct a false-flag attack with the aim to frame it as being orchestrated by "MAGA communists", whom they would claim the non-revisionists elements on their site were followers of. On September 23, the moderators would initate their false-flag attack by creating a number of fake imposter accounts of themselves (which were used to draw attention to their actions) and would proceed to create an instance of Lemmygrad.ml called "Lemmygrad.com".

The lead "moderator" of Lemmygrad.com, whose username on that site was "MAGACOMMUNISM", posted inflammatory material (which the Lemmygrad moderators who covertly controlled the "Lemmygrad.com" instance hoped to result in increased resentment against non-Third Worldist ideology amongst the Lemmygrad usership) and, later on, they would even create fake accounts of anti-revisionist users on Lemmygrad in order to frame them as "MAGA communists".

A day of the creation of "Lemmygrad.com", the Lemmygrad moderators had decided that they were fortuitous in their plot to turn the usership of Lemmygrad against anti-revisionism and even revolutionism, and they disabled the site, claiming it had been taken down due to "copywrite issues", although there exists no proof for this claim. They had framed members of the Lemmygrad Hoxhaism community as "MAGA communists", thus they concluded the time was ripe for a purge.

The "great purge" of Lemmygrad

On September 27, 2022, the Lemmygrad moderation would initiate the biggest ideological purge the site has witnessed. Within the span of a mere hour, over 200 accounts were banned based upon ideological reasons, including 124 members of the Hoxhaism community on Lemmygrad. Following this, the Lemmygrad moderation would create two new site rules, which banned "Patriotic socialism" and anti-revisionist trends respectively. While this purge was able to remove remaining "Patriotic socialist" elements on Lemmygrad, it largely targeted anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninists. Anybody who expresses anti-revisionist view is banned on Lemmygrad, despite anti-revisionists be firmly hostile towards social-chauvinism.

Structure

Moderation

The site currently has effectively the same moderation teams as when it was founded in 2019. No election for moderation positions have taken place on the site. The currently moderators largely has extensive ties to other Dengist forums and propaganda outlets, with, for instance, moderator Felipe Forte being the founder of the Dengist disinformation hub "ProleWiki". The moderation prevent non-revisionists from creating an account on the platform.

Coordination of raids against external sites

The site moderation openly promote users of Lemmygrad to organize raids (also known as "brigades") against external sites, commonly those which do not comply with their ideological line. The moderators have, as of 2023, organized raids against 27 separate websites (most of which have been against socialists sites). The site generally targets subreddits, wikis, and Discord servers.

Online piracy

The site allows and even promotes online piracy. Various communities on the site provide links to torrenting software, piracy websites, and the dark web. Many software piraters have created accounts on Lemmygrad in order to evade the administration policy on Reddit.

The "People's Court" of Lemmygrad

The moderators have formed a "people's court" on Lemmygrad which officially exists to "discuss administrative issues in a more transparent manner" and provide "internal democracy", however, the function of this "people's court" entails little actual transparent discussion nor democracy. Even in instances where the community elects on a certain decision, the moderators rarely, if ever, abide by it. This "court" itself acts merely as a place where the moderators can "inform" the usership of certain decisions, although the rest of their administration is entirely secretive.

Ideology

Lemmygrad, like other Dengist communities, claims to follow "Marxism-Leninism" along with maintaining an "anti-imperialist" stance. However, their ideology is fundamentally little more than a deviation of Marxism-Leninism, with the Lemmygrad moderatorship of community defending social-imperialism and even bourgeois state such as the modern Russian Federation.

Anti-science promotion

Lemmygrad formerly contained users promoting anti-science content such as claiming that ADHD does not exist. The community responsible for this, c/antipsychiatry, has since been banned.

Third Worldism

Some users on Lemmygrad express Third-Worldist views, although the majority do not.

Social-imperialism and pro-Russian war propaganda

Lemmygrad supports Chinese and former Soviet social-imperialisn as well as Russian imperialism, including and particularly its current war in Ukraine. The leadership of Lemmygrad falsely views social-imperialism as being a mere "term" concocted by "Trotskyists".

During the 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine, Lemmygrad users have actively propagated Ukrainophobic views, posting content which glorifies the suffering of the Ukrainian working class, denying Russian warcrimes, claiming that Russia's imperialist action is an "anti-fascist liberation war", and even claiming that the majority of Ukrainians are followers of Nazism (called by the Lemmygrad users "Ukronazis").

Views on LGBT+

Lemmygrad supports the LGBT+ community, and the community c/lgbt has over 400 users, although many are inactive. There is also a trans community with about 15 active users.

Criticism

Lack of ideological discussion

Lemmygrad has been frequently criticized for its lack of ideological diversity and discussion. All users on Lemmygrad are effectively required to follow Dengist ideology, and those who do not are banned hastily. As a result of this, the postings on the site regularly devolve into dull mockery of so-called "ultras", without these "ultras" being able to actually defend their arguments. Thus making Lemmygrad an ideological "echo-chamber" of sorts.

See also

• Lemmy
• ProleWiki
• 4chan
• 8chan