Lemmygrad

Logo of lemmygrad.ml.

Lemmygrad is a principally Marxist–Leninist instance of Lemmy with pro-China tendencies founded in August 2019. As of September 2023, the site is the fifteenth most popular instance of Lemmy, with it hosting nearly 50,000 posts and around 600 active users per month, although actual patterns of user activity varies.

Lemmygrad was founded at a time when Reddit was cracking down on communist communities as a way for communists to have their own space free of corporate rules and ownership.

According to an unpublished paper from data researchers at Binghamton and Cyprus Universities, lemmygrad.ml ranked among the top "domains of tankies" on the internet.

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 Wisconcom

In June 2022, a self-proclaimed Hoxhaist by the name of Wisconcom would join Lemmygrad.ml. He would quickly center his posts around criticizing China specifically. Other users of Lemmygrad, by and large supporters of the People's Republic of China (Dengists), began to argue with Wisconcom who did not budge on his views. Wisconcom was eventually banned from Lemmygrad for being overly combative after several user reports about his bad faith and insulting behavior,although the founder of Lemmygrad later stated that he was banned for "ultra-leftism".

Wisconcom quickly created another account under the name of Ouisconkom and created the c/Hoxhaism community. The community he had created was being used almost solely to criticize China and not, as the administrators had 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 creator 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, his banning also deleted the communities that he had created.

Later, Wisconcom would come back to Lemmygrad under different alt accounts trying to bait and stoke trouble within the community. His accounts were quickly banned again for ban evasion.

Lemmygrad.com copycat 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 formalize 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 formalized 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 behavior. However, it was formalized 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...) 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 timeline 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 describes itself as "principally Marxist-Leninist" and supportive of "actually existing socialism". Users who do not entirely follow this line are allowed to some extent, may be subject to censorship and bans.

Lemmygrad has made necessary changes to its working principles in response to its growth over the years as a community.