Kaja • she/her

I think in general the American protest movement is really behind on ideas for what to do when the government doesn’t want to listen. I’ve been to tons of “stand around and wave signs until change happens” protests, for BLM, migrants, LGBT people, healthcare, strike support, the only time the protest ever made any impact was when the march was in support of a strike.

Blocking up streets with protest works when it’s being done to amplify the impact of a work stoppage, but just waving signs around on their own doesn’t do anything, especially when the people you’re protesting don’t particularly want to placate the protestors.

And like, I get that “build a nationwide labor movement that can go on a general strike” as a step one for a protest is an impossibly tall order, but we gotta face facts that just having a lot of people come out and wave signs around alone doesn’t do anything.

Share where? All the platforms that you’re implying people should share it on are either controlled by the oligarchs as well, or so sparsely populated you’re going to only reach some absurdly small percent of the population.

I’m not trying to be a downer, it’s better to be doing something than nothing, but if the oligarchs you’re protesting own Facebook, Twitter/X, Google, AWS, etc, it just seems clear to me that if you can’t rely on the news to report about it, you definitely can’t rely on sharing to spread the word about it.

The really quick summary is that the mods of the 196 community on blahaj.zone wanted to move the community to lemmy.world, but did not announce it publicly to the users or seek their input, and so when the announcement came out, users of the instance felt blindsided by the announcement, and that lemmy.world was a fairly unpopular choice of instance. The resulting discussion from the thread largely did not dissuade skeptical users and contributed to the feelings that the mods were making a unilateral decision based on their desire and ignoring what the users of 196 wanted, and the decision to keep the original community on lemmy.blahaj.zone locked meant that users who did not want to post on lemmy.world were losing out their community.

This resulted in another 196 clone being created on blahaj, the original 196 becoming unlocked, and so now there are 3 196 communities. The newest one, [email protected], has a particularly high posting rate right now, as users are attempting to assert that community’s support as opposed to the ones run by the mods of the original and the lemmy.world communities.