I'm gonna be frank here, after years of using this site, I really, really think that a lot of posts on here are some kind of weird op. Sometimes it's more obvious (see the resident hasbarist who, for some reason, hangs around a tiny leftist imageboard posting active zionist talking points and not engaging with anything that contradicts those), but there's a strain of comparatively subtle stuff which creeps me out a bit. I think there has been an active effort to sow misanthropy, distrust, bigotry, and paranoia among online communities, and despite our small size, I think that we're a target, and I also think there's an active effort to shit up this site.
I remember, years ago, when I could still use .org
(I later started getting banned for no discernible reason, and nobody would tell me why it kept happening or what it was over, so I kept getting banned and unbanned and re-banned and the site became unusable), the main arguments against .net were built on screenshots of the catalog, and it always made this site look super reactionary. Since joining, I've realized that, for the most part, very few of the
big, scary, reactionary threads that are posted (and periodically bumped) on this site seem to have very much substance - like, the amount of actual fascists/racists/perverts/whatever who have any actual enthusiasm for whatever they're arguing is pretty low, and even when there seemed to be more of them on this site, there wasn't much user sympathy for them. Today, it seems like these threads have basically no substance and just are kept afloat in order to compete with threads which have actual relevance / contain fully fleshed out ideas and arguments against capitalism and imperialism. It's important,
to someone, that the latest posts on Leftychan.net are weird LLM-generated rants advocating for pedophilia, or bizarre alien-like diatribes against women or black people or transhumanists which read like they were written by someone who only knows about these groups from ragebait memes and idpol propaganda. Usually this stuff goes absolutely nowhere; in fact, like half of the "arguments" presented were tired circa 2016, it just kind of sticks around near the front of the site for a while, which is an easy thing to achieve since this site already has such a small regular userbase. Having been around here for years, I think that a lot of this stuff is only posted/bumped in order to discourage new users by making the site and its userbase look bad.
I'm not arguing for censorship here, I genuinely don't know what to do about this (except in cases of LLM slop and more obvious reactionary propaganda) besides just expanding our promotion as much as possible to reach wider audiences so we pick up more people with thicker skins who hold coherent leftist/proletarian political positions so that they drown out the dogshit. That's basically the effect you see on good larger sites, even ones with lax moderation and no algorithm, so it's the best possible course for Leftychan too. It's unfortunately pretty apparent that we've seen a lot of brain drain since the creation of the site - looking at old posts, this is very obvious. OG /leftypol/ back on 8ch, in its heyday, attracted
a lot of activity from people with a genuine academic interest in, and knowledge of, socialism, leftist movements, anarchism, and their history, differences, and theory, and there are old threads on this site where that clearly carried over from /leftypol/ and its successor Bunkerchan. Neither .org nor .net today represent that tradition; .org lost it through active suppression and hostility towards the community
(they're feds), and I assume that we've lost it through a gradual loss of activity and perhaps burnout.
This will sound weird, but at some point it would be good to create a fbi.gov group again. I don't like Disc or use it, so I'm not going to be helpful on this front, but losing that seems to have had a modest negative impact on the site, and obviously we lost it for a fucking bullshit reason (.org was getting raided and a bunch of retards mistook us for .org and attacked our Disc)… and I don't blame anyone for not remaking it, but it doesn't seem to have helped us that we haven't had the time. Disc is shit, and participating in it is shit, but we still have to diversify our outreach a bit within reason. IIRC we had a Telegram channel once, too (am I wrong?) but eventually shut it down due to inactivity; it might be good to restart that or start a channel on Signal or something. An official community YouTube channel could also be good; we don't produce that many videos now, but it might stimulate our production a bit if we increased potential reach.
Twitter, unfortunately, suppresses the fuck out of us - they suppress virtually all leftist posts now, especially vocally anti-zionist ones, but we are no exception. Despite growing our following on there by more than 3x what it was a few years ago, our post reach on that site has dropped to nearly nothing, and the speed of growth has been completely stifled from what it was at the time when the growth began. We have essentially zero options for online outreach in mainstream social media; only more organic sites with no algorithms like Spacehey and FriendRewind bear any potential as far as formal social media goes. Mentioning Leftychan on small forums would also be worth doing, although it should be pointed out that small forums frown on outright promotion and any reference to Leftychan would have to be respectful of this. We could stand to join BlueSky, if we want and have time, but we'd probably have to keep it pretty tame over there, and it might suppress us, too.
I think I'm going to go ahead and make stickers or design a sticker as requested in
>>157214. Real world promo is a lot harder to suppress even if the reach has natural limits.
I can't afford to print them myself, but if somebody can, then I can send the design to them. In the past, I wanted to draw it, but never found time to do that, so I'll just whip up something.