Lemmygrad

Lemmygrad is a sectarian Marxist-Leninist instance of Lemmy founded in August 2019. As of February 2023, the site hosts nearly 40,000 posts and around 300 active users per month, although actual patterns of user activity varies.

Lemmygrad was founded at a time when Reddit was cracking down on pro-China leftist communities as a way for people of such a stance to have their own space free of corporate rules and ownership. However, the site is known to restrict and censor communists who fail to support China, Russia, and "actually existing socialism" countries.

History

Founding and early developments

Lemmygrad was founded in August 2019, with its first post being on the 17th of that month.

Genzedong migration

In March 2022, the GenZedong subreddit was quarantined on Reddit. As usual during a ban wave, it mostly targeted right-wing subreddits but a left-wing subreddit was added in the wave so that Reddit could claim they were impartial in their bans. Its accompanying communities of "GenZhou" (its educational outlet) and "GenZhukov" (its military history and tactics outlet) were banned, according to Reddit, for being used to evade the quarantine on GenZedong despite being created prior to the quarantine.

Lemmygrad received a huge influx of users at that time and had to establish user account vetting as, at the same time, trolls from GenUSA (a pro-US imperialism, chauvinist community made in response to the growing popularity of GenZedong) were also making accounts to troll Lemmygrad.

As a response to this huge influx of new users, the administrators of Lemmygrad made several posts to try and get them acclimated to Lemmygrad quickly, as it was different to Reddit in many ways (in the rules, the federation aspect, and the methods of moderating). Eventually, two moderators from GenZedong were made into site admins so there could be communication between the community of GenZedong and the administrators of Lemmygrad. One of them later agreed to leave the administration on amicable terms.

This increase in site activity was temporary and eventually subsided later in the year 2022. However, the c/GenZedong community on Lemmygrad remains the forum's most active community.

Denial-of-service attacks

Along with the migration of the GenZedong community, Lemmygrad suffered denial-of-service (DoS) attacks against it, taking down the site for a number of hours at some points between March and May. This prompted the administrators of Lemmygrad to switch to another hosting provider with better (D)DoS protection, as well as update the Lemmy code to patch the vulnerabilities the attackers were using.

Purge of the c/Hoxhaism community and banning of its creator

In June 2022, a self-proclaimed Hoxhaist user by the name of Wisconcom would join Lemmygrad.ml. He would quickly centre his posts around China specifically, hurling all sorts of criticism at it. Regular users of Lemmygrad, whom by and large supported the People's Republic of China, began to argue with Wisconcom who did not budge on his views, using dubious or anti-communist sources such as the Hindustan Times, the Peterson Institute for International Economics or even tabloids such as "CAKnowledge".

Wisconcom was eventually banned from Lemmygrad for being overly combative and after several user reports about his bad faith and insulting behaviour, although the founder of Lemmygrad later added that he was also banned for "ultra-leftism".

He quickly created another account under the name of Ouisconcom and created the c/Hoxhaism community (c/ being the prefix to all community URLs on Lemmy). The community he had created was being used almost solely to criticise China and not, as the administrators expected, used to talk about Hoxhaism or Hoxha to any notable extent. A post was made looking for user input on this community and the general consensus was the community should either be repurposed, or completely deleted and the user banned for ban evasion.

Eventually, the Lemmygrad community was in agreement that Wisconcom should be banned and the Hoxhaism community repurposed. However, due to the functioning of the Lemmy software at the time, when he was banned so were all the communities he had created.

Later, Wisconcom would come back to Lemmygrad under different names trying to bait and stoke trouble within the community. His accounts were quickly banned again for ban evasion, as by that point nobody on Lemmygrad had any patience left for his antics.

Lemmygrad.com imposter site

In September 2022, alleged patriotic socialists of the infrared community created lemmygrad.com, a website that was meant to copy Lemmygrad but with a "MAGA Communist" purpose.

The administrators of Lemmygrad, to protect their reputation, announced they had contacted lemmygrad.com's hosting provider on the grounds of copyright infringement (one of the only things they could do that went against the Terms of Services). The host replied very quickly and took down lemmygrad.com, although the domain name was still usable by its owner.

Presently, the domain redirects to a transphobic account on Twitter.

Formalisation of rules

In the same month of September, the administrators of Lemmygrad would formalise two rules they had always operated on:

• No porn or sexually explicit content (even if marked NSFW).
• No right-deviationists (patsocs, nazbols, strasserists, duginists, etc).

The first rule was formalised by popular demand, although like most Marxist spaces, Lemmygrad did not allow pornography or other sexual nudity content from the start.

The second rule was also being operated on after some belligerent patriotic socialists attempting to create accounts on Lemmygrad and ultimately brought down the enjoyment the community had in using the website with their disruptive behaviour. However, it was formalised after lemmygrad.com was created as a basis to provide transparency to the community and make the banning of future patriotic socialists easier.

Merging of "Shit X Say" communities

Shit X Say communities, popular on Reddit (ShitLiberalsSay, ShitRedditSays, etc.) were quickly brought over to Lemmygrad. For a while, c/ShitLiberalsSay was the biggest community. Eventually though, many more such communities were created by users and often left to abandon. Other users started complaining about these many communities that also, they felt, polluted their feed and prevented them from seeing things other than hateful content. As such it was decided based on popular demand that all communities following the "Shit X Say" format would be merged under just two communities: ShitReactionariesSay and ShitUltrasSay. No other community of this type would be permitted on Lemmygrad after this.

Ideology

Lemmygrad has grown from an almost unvisited website back when it started to one of the biggest instances using the Lemmy software. This has caused many changes to happen in the working principles of the forum so as to respond to this external as well as internal growth.

Lemmygrad is principally Marxist-Leninist and supportive of "actually existing socialism". Users who do not entirely follow this line, while on occasion being allowed entry, are usually prohibited from creating an account, censored, and are otherwise banned from the site. For example, in 2022, the moderators of Lemmygrad began arbitrarily removing posts from, and banning the creator of, the Ba'athist community on the platform for simply expressing criticism of Dengism on their community.