I’ve been mulling over Janus Rose’s recent 404 Media article, “You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism.”. In many ways, she’s not wrong. But once again people are ignoring an entirely other way of doing social media that can, in fact, fight fascism.

. . .

What is to be done? Well, Rose argues that there is no antidote to Trumpian poison to be found in merely taking to social media and posting about his (or Elon Musk’s, or Pete Hesgeth’s, or any other Trumpist’s) bizarre or cruel statements. “If there’s one thing I’d hoped people had learned going into the next four years of Donald Trump as president,” she writes, “it’s that spending lots of time online posting about what people in power are saying and doing is not going to accomplish anything. If anything, it’s exactly what they want.”

. . .

Can folks doomscroll on the fediverse? Yes. Can folks post on the fediverse? Yes. Might they post about the latest outrage of Trump? Yes, definitely.

Does that mean they are failing to fight incipient fascism? No.

In fact, I argue that the act of running, moderating, and participating in federated social media is precisely the sort of organizing that Rose calls for. It’s just taking place in a media environment, rather than, say, in an NGO’s offices in a city.

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[–] PugJesus@lemmy.world 77 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I wouldn't place any high value on what we're doing here. At best, you should view this as bitching about the news at the local college-kid frequented coffeeshop. Yes, there is an element of raising awareness and discussion - it's not useless, but ultimately, it's not going to play a major role in getting us out of this shitshow. We're discussing matters because it brings us some relief to do so, first and foremost.

[–] FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 25 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

To be fair I think lemmy kind of radicalised me. When I got here I felt like a left wing outcast on reddit, but I was in reality more like somewhere between a socdem and a dem soc type.

After a year here, I’ve been enlightened so much on online privacy and FOSS and stuff, learnt a lot about leftism and cool movements like solarpunk, and now find myself using the label “anarchism” to describe my political views. Lemmy has definitely slowly radicalised me and taught me a bunch of stuff.

Obviously lemmy is not perfect

(Also has it’s downsides, like a large tankie presence, aka. CCP and Putin propagandists, but to be honest, the left wing subs of reddit have been kind of taken over by tankie mods as well, which is part of the reason I switched to lemmy, most leftist communities on reddit felt authoritarian)

[–] WrittenInRed@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Same thing here. I was always vaguely left wing/pro FOSS/etc, but joining Lemmy introduced me to solarpunk and a much more anarchist/radical community in general. Since I started using Lemmy during the reddit API stuff I pretty quickly went from wishing I ate less meat -> vegetarian -> vegan and from vaguely anti-capitalism -> anarchist. Now I'm learning to hand mend my clothes and joining local mutual aid groups lol.

Just posting about bad things happening shouldn't be the limit of what action people take (unless that's all they can do obviously), but it's also far from completely pointless to try and spread awareness of stuff like anarchism/anti-capitalism or ways you can make an impact/support others. Movements and ideas can't spread if no one is talking about them. Plus posting about actual concrete actions you can do is super useful to anyone who wants to do something but doesn't know how to start.

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 9 points 1 week ago

I think you are underestimating the effect. I've learned a whole lot in my year and a half here. Enough to develop a decent understanding of what's going on and what concrete actions I could take in my corner of the world. I think we can't expect action without understanding of why act and what action. I think discussions here help with that. For all the people who post and comment, there are many who read, learn go find out more, and so on. Some of those would take action that they wouldn't have otherwise. If we don't platform that do this, if all there is are corporate platforms that keep people unaware of even the basics of what's happening beyond the reporting, then the number of people who'd act in some productive way would be even lower.