Our community is growing larger and larger. Two weeks ago, we had finally passed the 1,000 users mark after years, and right now we are already at almost 2,000 users. Possible causes for this are the very recent US government censorship of Reddit. In the course of 3 weeks, Reddit banned the left-leaning r/chapotraphouse, r/MoreTankieChapo, and left the subsequent ideological refugees in r/MoreMoreTankieChapo also homeless.
Good news, we exist, and our community welcomes all revolutionaries, especially marxist-leninists. In this website, we uphold the past and current* socialist experences. We love hate speech, we are only against bourgeois ideology and reactionary language**.
We have been entering Reddit, albeit slowly, but we’re still trying to make our way to be known before the r/communism and r/communism101 are banned and loses all its subscribers and consequently awareness of our space. We shouldn’t worry about it, though, we can make an organized effort to bring comrades here later, also.
The thing is, we need a name, comrades. Most of the time I’ve seen the comrades share our community around was either saying “the communist Lemmy instance”, the “Communist Lemmy”, “communism.lemmy”, or something along those lines. These are not easy to remember.
Comrade @muad_dibber@lemmygrad.ml suggested that we could do a public poll to decide a name, to be approved by both users and administrators.
Let’s keep in mind the most voted one shouldn’t necessarily be the chosen one, but would certainly influence admin decision. The reason for this is that while the majority may vote for simple and catchy names (which is good), it may actually be also useful to check for distinctive names that could make our community appear on top on search engines, for example.
What are you waiting for? Get going, comrade. We will need a name to begin our propaganda effort.
*Current socialist experiences include China, Cuba, Vietnam and People’s Korea.
**Reactionary language means any discrimination against historically oppressed peoples, like women, trans folk, non-white folk, etc. Racism, sexism, ableism, xenophobia, and LGBT discrimination should not be allowed, not even ironically.
For what’s it worth I think now is a poor time to change it because:
Its been spammed around a bit (for months actually, even before CTH was banned) on reddit so lots of people know it in the back of their heads or have it bookmarked and changing the name will only cause more confusion and difficulty for those refugees from reddit who may be struggling to remember the name (at least this one is simple and obvious). Changing the name will result in more confusion in the wake of more bans (IF they come, I’m not sure reddit really intends to do anything but drive CTH users off) as people only casually paying attention may recommend to others the old url so if it doesn’t point to the new location that would be a major problem I think.
That’s really my only concern.
That’s quite easy to solve with a redirect. But we’re probably not changing the url for now, just the name of the instance, and that name we’ll share around.
this is honestly how I feel about it. At this point, it’s probably a bad idea to change it.
The longer you leave it though it might be worse, people will get used to the current name.
As for a name maybe just “Red” because it is simple, describes it well enough and it’s kinda funny that it’s coincidentally the first syllable of “Reddit”
IMO changing it at this point might fuck with people’s saved URL, which would be suicide if the URL doesn’t redirect to here. Though, the site being called “lemmy” isn’t helpful for searching, because every search term but “lemmy website” takes you to the artist, and “lemmy website” only takes you to the dev branch of the site. If we’re going to rename, it needs to be something unique to make it search-engine-able, and in my opinion if we’re deadset on changing the name, we might as well go with something poetic, which is why my suggestion is “Laika”. This is the left’s starlight beacon to a new future, in our continuing quest to unify under one banner. So, might as well be the Soviet space doggo. Also if it’s Laika, we’ll have a mascot.
Love the idea of Laika as a mascot. I am also partial to Yuri. I see no fascist mods here!
RIP :service dog:
Yeah I like Laika
Laika is sick! I wish Valentina Tereshkova‘s name was short and catchy like that. But Laika is cool as hell.
so there is a musician by the same name. the suggested names should also be run through a search engine
but it is probably a bad time to suddenly swap names
I’m not saying never change it. I’m saying maybe hold off for a bit until things have calmed down. As it is I think with the evolving situation we stand to gain a lot of new users if the situation on reddit continues. I think in a month or two the situation may be markedly different. I’m just saying during a transitional period for many people it would be very unwise to kind of fuck with the ability for people to find it. I know there are people who probably bookmarked this place from months ago (I know I did) who may only now or shortly begin to look for a new home and go through their bookmarks looking for that one alternative they know they bookmarked on CTH ages ago.
I do think a re-direct for a time would be helpful though for those who have it bookmarked. Certainly if the lemmy part of the URL is being changed that is a huge problem. But I reiterate that waiting a little bit would be best as there are a still a lot of people floating around uncertainly waiting on CTH. I know there’s been some drama with liberals being on the mod team for the CTH discord and banning ML’s lately so I think that’s another situation we should wait on. It is entirely possible if regrettable that imperialist, chauvinist elements seize control of the new CTH lemmy instance which is set to launch later this week and if they do and this website URL has changed there are going to be a lot of lost refugees who have no idea where to go.
Which is a real tragedy because as a liberal it’s easy to find a place online to go and network, same thing as a reactionary. But as any kind of anti-capitalist, to say nothing of someone who has a principled anti-imperialist line it is very hard and if the URL changes there are going to be a lot of people who don’t know subs like sendinthetanks on reddit or whatever and won’t find us again.