Well this will be my first post. I don't know how I should categorize it. I thought of just throwing it into the already-existing brainstorming thread, but I feel that this subject itself is important enough to all of us that it should have its own thread. If people disagree with me then I guess this can just be taken down, and I can put it in the brainstorming thread. I wrote out some jumbled thoughts in a text file a few months ago, I decided to revise them. I'll just write this more honestly than I did the first time, a question I had for myself while writing was 'Is it even possible to reach out to people and build communities online?'

I would wager that most people here can agree that there is some kind of conspiracy being waged by a shadowy cabal of wealthy elites that use government and corporations to get the world populace to do their bidding, even when it is against the will of the individuals composing the populace, their ultimate goal being to enslave humanity which can only be done efficiently with the assistance of sophisticated technology.

I would also wager that people here can agree that in recent years particularly, a great facilitator of this technological enslavement has been the proprietary, cryptic code running off of the vast majority (99%) of people's phones and computers. The code composing the various applications people use in their day to day lives. Google's varied services like their search engine and internet browser, Google Docs, Images, Books, Ads, Classroom, reCaptcha, YouTube, Gmail, Google has services covering every element of modern life, they are too great in number to list. What other garbage do people use? Jogged my memory with this. https://www.businessofapps.com/data/most-popular-apps/ Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Discord, TikTok, Snapchat, Spotify, and Telegram for people who want to feel like they are communicating privately and or anonymously.

These services all have some practical purposes, communication namely, secondarily would be entertainment. They allow you to communicate with other people, and share information, all for free. Not entirely freely though. Before using a service a user must agree to a legally binding contract immuning the service from whatever deeds the service pledges to perpetrate against a user, so that a user effectively volunteers their psyche to be mapped out to the finest granular level, from whence it can be manipulated, and it is manipulated for the purpose of causing the user to provide the service greater profit. The information the users of a service provide is used to advertise products to the users, which they buy, and a portion of the profit generated by the purchases finds its way back to the companies providing the service, or instead the operators of the service sell the information to advertisers and make their money then and there.

The information used for sales is aggregated through numerous methods, all of which are conducted deliberately by the applications used to interface with the services. For this reason the applications are regarded as spyware, as they collect data through methods beyond the understanding of their users, effectively spying on them. The ability to comprehend the mechanics of the spyware is prevented by the concealment of the code composing the spyware, this also helps to prevent people from being able to eliminate the spyware features.

Anyway, this provides the aforementioned wealthy elites with capital to conduct their crooked activities. The business model of free spyware services is enormously successful. Free spyware services have dominated the world for years. Like I said before, the vast majority of people use these spyware services. And these services, namely social media, is used to promote ideas that are harmful to the individual, as this will strengthen the power structure. If the promoted ideas ever speak of a freedom it is only for the sake of manipulating people into weakening themselves, it isn't a true freedom. And they demonize ideas that truly empower an individual, as well as censor them. Now this sets a very dangerous precedent, and the precedent has been completely accepted by the masses with miniscule meaningful resistance.

Anyway I don't wanna go harping on. The point is that nothing I said was original, most here would agree with it, and would add more on to that little outline. And I will go further to say that what I vaguely outlined is a greatly negative force within the world that should be fought against, and I would assume most people here would agree with that as well. So, what my post is about is discussing methods of working against this negativity. Obviously promoting the usage of libre software would be something to start with.

This is where a problem arises in my post. Having a distinct message. I was going to go on to say that 'We need to develop methods of convincing people to liberate themselves', but what are they to be liberated of? If there is no distinct message, you won't be able to reach out to people very effectively. So having a message is of course necessary. Introduce people to how they're being fucked over, the innumerable CONspiracies played out over the course of the last century, the injustices of the educatory and governmental systems of the world, the surveillance and why it is a problem and the potential consequences it may have, and so forth. A fair share of the members of this community already run websites discussing these issues, and even more could go on to make their own websites discussing this, and we could encourage people with similar sites to join us. Might there need to be some kind of central body of work that people volunteer contributions to which goes on to form an ideology of sorts, so that there may be a distinct message? Probably not. For the sake of this post not becoming too clusterfucked, what we all agree upon can be 'our' vague message. I only mentioned this because me saying something like 'We need to develop methods of convincing people to liberate themselves' in order to continue with the main point of my post, that being methods of outreach, without some protracted outpouring of my own bullshit ideas to describe what there is to be liberated of is vague and worthless.

So then, there must be methods of outreach developed so that we can engage people, and try to convince them to liberate themselves, so to speak. How can we actually reach out to people, and grow our communities that we participate in?

Some vessels for outreach that I thought of immediately: YouTube For reaching out to people I figured YouTube would be the best one. Everyone habitually consumes "content" 24/7 now so video sharing services will reach large numbers of people, of which the only relevant one is YouTube. It works for some people. There's 3 privacy/anonymity/libre software oriented channels on YouTube which are Luke Smith, Mental Outlaw, and The Hated One. None of them run XMPP servers, and I think they should but they don't. They have certainly reached new people. Videos need to be short enough to not get tossed by the algorithm, but need to have enough information to educate people. Videos must be stimulating as well. Video titles and thumbnails should try to grab people's attention, borderline-clickbait, I don't care if it's frowned upon since the idea is to reach people.

Of course people consume "content" 24/7 to keep away the pain of everyday life, and that'd be another important thing. Ideally a movement/cause would offer people some way out of their suffering, or at least some refuge, that's why faggots sit in XMPP chatrooms all day long, it's an escape, I guess an escape that doesn't datamine people would be better.

Other forums Reddit I have heard that diggy has been censored on some reddit forums so I don't know how fruitful the attempted spreading of his site, or anyone else's sites would be. Still, I don't think people have even tried so I don't think I can really say this is not a viable option.

Joining webrings Lainchan's webring has over a hundred sites I think and there is a thread on one of their boards where people can have their sites added to it, that could be a possibile place to find more people.

Email There could be mass emailing campaigns in order to promote certain websites. This would be of questionable legality and efficacy.

Social Media This is quite shallow in terms of the shared media. Short form videos at best, and images. I really don't know how influential it could be. Any information projected through this sphere must be highly condensed, attention-grabbing, and must direct people toward a website or websites, and those websites would probably need to have a condensed message that can eloquently present a set of ideas to a visitor. The website needs to be interesting enough to warrant them revisiting it.

Real life Flyers Banners Stickers Graffiti All of these could be used to promote the URL to a website. Obviously the website has to be designed to be able to process the people directed towards it. It has to be attention-grabbing, has to have some coherent and comprehensive message to deliver to them, and have a cryptic nature, otherwise they'll just visit a random site and become disinterested. Now all of these are also illegal or legally questionable, so obviously some form of correspondence between the parties involved would be required, otherwise somebody could unintentionally bring legal attention upon a website wanting no involvement with graffiti for example.

Mailing letters Making phone calls (to random people) Pirate radio I really don't think these would be all that effective in reaching new people, just some random ideas.

YouTube is one of the most crucial vectors as it facilitates longer videos as opposed to shit like TikTok, Instagram, whatever people use, and also those services are damn near impossible to use anonymously since you need to be using a phone, have an 'approved' phone number, 'approved' email, anonymizers are banned. At least with YouTube you can theoretically use it semi-anonymously, without a phone number or gmail afaik. But there is all of the censorship on the platform, I think Luke Smith for example has suffered from it. But on the other hands, Mental Outlaw and The Hated One's channels seemed to do quite well, but they are both far more technology oriented which is why they've went seemingly uncensored.

The censorship on social media is surely far worse than on YouTube. And it's not even just censorship, but algorithms, that you have to work against, same on YouTube. All content shared on these platforms is stratified so that virtually only people who would be interested in some form of content will see it. The minority of people viewing something will have never been introduced to the ideas expressed by the content before. The goal would be to reach new people, not form an echo-chamber on a shitty Big Tech platform. At the same time, even just reaching a few hundred REAL new people could make a difference, so long as you could bring them onto XMPP or IRC, or even just develop semi-regular email correspondence with them. Anyway, with some creativity obviously one can find ways to semi-effectively game the algorithm, but they can never consistently escape the trap of the algorithm, and it is an issue and it's not ameliorable, so people will just have to roll with it.

I really don't know if mass emailing would do much good. Most people who see a random email probably won't read it. Now, if it's cryptic, then maybe they will. But then there's all of the anti-spam filters set up by Google, so who knows how successful it'd really be, lots of shit won't get through and if it does it'll wind up in spam. The efficacy of it depends upon the security in which you could conduct emailing. If you were to use an email provider that permits you to use their service anonymously, that domain in particular will be more likely to be on Google's shit-list, it could be pre-blocked.

I wonder if it would be best to have an organized effort behind the evangelization of Big Tech communities, as there is the potential that their automated systems could somehow flag (or have maybe even already flagged) people here's websites. If either were true, then an attempted evangelizing at any level, low or high, would likely die out rather quickly, so it could be best to try to move in fast. Maybe I'm wrong though, because if there was an organized effort to spread things, well, it'd appear unnatural, and so that could cause things to get flagged. And what's more, say on forums like reddit, admins and pozzed redditors would be inclined to notice an unnatural spreading of 'our message', they could deduce an organized effort, and so that effort could self-sabotage.

I truthfully don't know what to do, I'll have to make my own website eventually. Maybe then I'd be in a better standing to attempt to reach out to people myself. But I think it'd really be in the best interest of everyone here to work together as a collective, because it's all of our lives at stake here ultimately.

I really do wonder if it is even possible to reach out to new people and form communities online, I think it might be, but people aren't trying. Please mention other things that could be used to reach out to people, because I am not knowledgeable on everything, nor have I thought of everything. Mastodon is one I didn't even consider in this post.

Quite the effort post there. I feel bad for writing a shorter response lol.

I agree that more co-operation is needed, if for nothing else than parsing information. That's what I tried to do with the creation of the wiki, but apparently all the people that can understand the syntax refuse to use it on principle. I'd like to work on some way of article submission that perhaps works around this.

A "coherent message" would be interesting, spreading the message of nanonyimity to all. Orange pilling the masses. I'm sure there's plenty of people who want to learn about the subjects at hand, giving them the option to (by spreading it through non-invasive means, ie soycial media) would be fine I think. Most of the methods you mentioned are not really illegal. Email spam and graffiti aside of course (some cities have dedicated areas - aka some isolated random ass rock - where graffiti is allowed however). And somehow PACs and shit are able to email bomb people and get away with it, I wonder how they do it...

I also come to the definite conclusion that, and perhaps this is an aside, that there should be more of a focus on total independence from the "grid" so to speak. That's not to say isolation (poor idiot Bob died of starvation and loneliness, but at least he didn't use no damn grid!), but just autonomy (can operate independently of the grid if they so choose or if it becomes necessary). Meshnets, homebrew CPUs (and attendant OSs), radio, SIP, solar and the like I feel like don't get enough attention (and when they do, they are viewed in a vacuum rather than as a cohesive solution ie "look at this cool quirky novel thing, how cute, goodbye!"). I feel like we are constantly on the defense, trying to "reduce" the amount of horseshit infused bullshit with viral aspects slowing encroaching its giant stinky ass upon everyone spyware in Firefox, or look at X through Nitter only to have an API change nuke the ability completely. Whether you consider this swirling the toilet bowl or simply the tip of the ice berg, I think we need to go deeper, to complete the message so to speak.

A secondary example: we get threads, discussion and so forth that are like "here look at my cool DE", or "wow asterisk really works good", or "random plan9 gastrointestinal distress". Where's the (gonna try out diggys 'only use gendered pronouns' here) dudete who whipped up her homebrew CPU (doesn't have to be original, just put together herself so as to be sure no backdoors, and without the need of some multi-$$$$$$$$ lab/factory or whatever) threw plan9 on it, is using SIP for phonecalls (it's a cyberdeck, therefore portable) but doesn't necessarily need the cellular network because she call her girlfriend over the radio meshnet, even though she lives miles away.

See what I'm saying? Where is this level of comprehensiveness? Instead we run around trying to find the least invasive email provider, the browser plugin asks the {censored} of privacy invasive defeat to be a little bit smaller.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying here vandalism, but I can't help but feel 'outreach' can really be a double edged sword. For one thing, outreach is only the beginning. What next? Will they stick around? Will they contribute? Perhaps they won't even listen at all. Unfortunately the all too annoyingly common problem of the average joe's mental block has not went away. People these days are surprisingly defensive and arrogant even towards things they know little to nothing about. I even posted something about that on the brainstorming thread not too long ago (http://us3xsdrhmhk4h3bkuq7ttkp6pocs4726esycpgwtogrpu3nfjj6eroqd.onion/digdeeper/brainstorming-thread.21/#1528). It doesn't even matter if the message is distinct, many people will still not listen (although being distinct will definitely help at least a little bit, plus you can't win them all, you have to accept that many NPCs are just too far gone at this point). People will also dismiss your website if it doesn't look like city slicker shit. Use HTML 3.2? 'NUUUU THIS LOOKS HECKIN SKETCHY AND DATED!1'. Just completely senseless brainrot. They've been so thoroughly socially engineered that before you can even reach out to them about the information itself, you first have to give them a reason to care. Somehow you have to make it sound appealing even to them. This can lead people to desperate/impulsive decision making like stripping the soul out of their web design, splitting text into bite size sentences to satisfy their dwindling attention span, and even oversimplifying the issue to the point where they don't even get the whole story anyways. Do that shit and you end up looking like everyone else. You may think in a way that's a good thing because you could larp as a normie source but then plant a redpill and make it gradual, but not only is that easier said than done, but would you actually want to do that? At that point you're basically resorting to some of the same tactics some useful idiots do. Appealing to the idiots, stooping down to their level, all just so you can HOPEFULLY get your message across. But let's say you do get your message across, you get some people on XMPP, got them set on the orangepill but...did you TRULY redpill them yet?

Here's where things get crazy. You see, people are either orangepilled or redpilled, but not always both. This has led to some interesting consequences. I'm sure you're already aware of the "redpilled but not orangepilled" scenario. Someone is very aware of the real problems with the world, they're well aware of the cabal as well as the useful idiots that contribute to it, and they can discuss so meaningfully, yet they contribute this discussion on places like youtube/bitchute/discord, places that are not at all ideal orangepill wise, however, these types of people usually don't need much convincing to be orangepilled, and some of them probably use these shit services but also use IRC and XMPP, whether it be on the side or if maybe that's their prime and youtube is on the side. Not to mention, I'm sure they use these shit platforms for, you know, the outreach. However, things get more complicated when you observe the "orangepilled but not redpilled" scenario. I'm afraid this is where the "faggots sit in XMPP chatrooms all day long" camp comes into play. Anybody who's been paying attention will understand even the 'oh so great XMPP' is not immune to shitshows and useful idiots. Far from it I'm afraid. The downfall of the spyware and digdeeper mucs are notable examples of this. Lackluster administration, impulsive spam, and questionable/degenerate individuals were not uncommon. The sad part, most people didn't even care. I hate to use the 'back in muh day' oldfag card, but looking at old chat logs, I really think we had it better back then. There were less fake and gay people, there was more real discussion, and we were actually treading more ground, getting shit done, and genuinely redpilling AND orangepilling people. Sure it wasn't perfect even back then, but it was still fucking great and the future seemed bright for the community. But unfortunately, as more people joined over the years, as more drama occured, things seemed uncertain going forward. Sure enough as time went on, many of the OGs would start to take their leave, whether they were just busy or really wanted out, and since little to nobody was left to hold their ground, the very culture of the muc began to change. Even those who did hold their ground either gave up or got desperate and resorted to low rung shit flinging tactics (typically ad hominem) that just made things worse. (Admittedly I would know because I was one of those people. Really wish I had done things differently now. ;_;)

As for the 'libre channels' you mentioned, I find it amusing how 2 of the 3 (Luke Smith and Mental Outlaw) actually did have guides on how to get into xmpp, but none of them use it, let alone made a muc (afaik). Luke Smith's reasoning most likely lies in his "Yes, Everyone on the Internet Is a Loser." (https://youtu.be/RH3D1cpm6do) and ""I WISH I HAD MORE INTERNET FRIENDS." - Literally Nobody" (https://youtu.be/fVsCLKErPqE) videos. As for Mental Outlaw, I have no idea tbh, he seems like he may be trooning out or something but I don't watch jewtubers enough to care what their up to anyways. Speaking of which, like or hate Luke, I honestly think he's kinda right when he says everyone on the internet is a loser. Sure he uhh...may be a hypocrite depending on who you ask since he's a "eceleb", assuming he was implying he's not a loser in any way (muh jewtube and 4chan), but I still agree with the core of the argument. I also think the "We are all cucks" segment of Digdeeper's "Avoiding "The Botnet" - impossible?" writeup (https://digdeeper.club/articles/botnet.xhtml#cuckery) is quite good even if he's a cuck too. tl;dr we rely too much on 'based internet communities', and it turns out even we are far from perfect. A lot of times we're all talk, but still rely on ISPs, IME, linux pseudostandards, muh alternative frontend band-aids, the grid, etc. We too make mistakes, and sometimes we're not even much better than the people we criticize. Once I truly realized that, it kinda sucked to think about at first, but over time it made it easier for me to be humble and truly try to help people rather than swing around the ad hominem slong for people not knowing better. I think that right there is one of the biggest problems we have when trying to redpill and orangepill people, especially if you actually want it done thoroughly. It's very easy to get caught up in cockiness when you become impatient with the constant pozzed bullshit so you just want to get to the point, even if that means resorting to ad-hominem, low rung rambles, and heated culture wars. Some of us seem to think we're in another parallel universe from them, that we're "the chosen ones" or "the 1%" even though that couldn't be further from the truth. That became more obvious over time as people started to speak up about this and finally become self-aware of what we're really doing.

So...what now? If we continue to attempt outreach, will it only make things worse, or can it be done right? I believe it can be done right, but it's far from easy. Informing the people is one thing, but we can't spoonfeed forever. They have to be willing to have the initiative to make a move on their own or else they will fail. Many people don't do this, and we can't realistically save them. If we did manage to bring them over but they're only half ass on board, they risk pozzing an entire community that was once a nice niche, and that's why many of us would rather stick with what we have rather than getting more people on board. It's one thing to wake up, but it's another thing entirely to actually get up.

You make a good point to be honest, it's something I was concerned with myself and something I am unable to answer adequately. I cannot in good faith speak upon the contamination of mucs by normies, as I wasn't around in the spyware or digdeeper mucs long enough to really witness their total downfall. If anything, I contributed to the downfall, having had appeared in early 2022 before the invasion of Ukraine. I wasted a lot of time in those mucs and never produced conversation due to a lack of ideas for topics to discuss, and that very lack of ideas caused by me sitting around in the mucs all day instead of learning. Some good people left whom I could've learned a lot from. And now I am left with only one muc full of the people like myself who contributed to the downfall, except now I have things I am becoming interested in discussing, but nobody to discuss them with, it is only undesirables brooding together now. The one saving grace is perhaps I can now progress onward to try and make things better.

It's a dilemma. On the one hand you bring in new people, and eventually the community dies, on the other, you don't bring in new people and instead sit around talking to the same people incessantly, and never reaching out to the broader world. Is that much better? If your discussion builds into something real, then sure, say for example your tightly-knit group of people decided to form a commune or something But if it doesn't build anywhere then you just have an echo-chamber. It's a story as old as time, it always happens. Chatrooms die, and forums die in their own rite (they don't disappear one day like chatrooms do), like 4chan for example, a more recent example could be found in the observation of lainchan. It is just the progression of things. It is especially true for good communities with freedom of speech, like with the digdeeper muc, it just cannot last forever because some asshole will come in and abuse it just for the sake of abusing it, solely to numb the pain in their heart.

What I will say is that you can always just create a private chatroom and invite your valued members to it. People even did that, I caught knowledge of some secret mucs broken off of spyware and digdeeper, which of course I wasn't brought into since I am an undesirable. Anyway, the way I see it, if your chatroom turns to shit you can always just break away from it and form a secretive secondary chatroom for good members. Then things will effectively continue as they did before.

But maybe my view on that is misguided, after all you guys did obviously try to bring people onto XMPP and it went to shit, but it will always go to shit eventually. Your question 'Will they contribute', sent me off writing some long post. As I said earlier I wonder if it is even possible for us to grow. I've decided against posting it since ideally I'd like to not turn this into a doom-and-gloom thread over my own inability to perceive a way through the conundrum we're faced with beyond sheer persistence of the operation of websites, in the face of the abyss. It would just inspire inaction. The way I see it, if we aren't trying, things will just continue to get worse. All we will do is speak into comfortable echo-chambers for the sake of passing the time, in that we will be no different from the rest of people online.

Don't have much to say but I'm really impressed with the discussion here :D

But, I do want to briefly cover the Mastodon / Fediverse option that's been glossed over but is actually extremely underrated. When Musk took over Twitter, the meme about it "hosting nazis" gained traction and people (meaning Twitter-using normies) began leaving en masse. This means Mastodon is now full of potential "convertees" (is that a word?) that would usually limit themselves to big tech platforms and stay out of reach for us.

What makes the Fediverse viable is that, well, it's that thing people sit all day on. And you have posts pop up into your timeline, meaning the person has to put less effort into interacting with you than with a website, etc. If you have a popular website, they can "follow" you on Masto and automatically see everything you say. A website, of course, does not work like this. I used to have a Masto for like, a year, and the reach I've achieved was surprising.

Another positive is that corporations have set up their bases there, too. And you, a pleb, can actually interact with the corpos ON EQUAL GROUND! It's insane, it's amazing, and it's extremely underrated. Mozilla says something stupid, you can respond AS AN EQUAL! And your response can get "liked" and "retooted" and suddenly half the world sees it. Absolutely impossible with a website.

There are negatives too, though. Masto posts tend to have a lifespan of a few hours at most. Meaning you need to sit there and post and post and post some more (this flaw could be countered by having a joint account; finally the "Digdeeper Team" meme could become a reality :D). Corpos like the FSF abuse the design to sit there and repeat literally the same few posts over and over. I suggest this is quite unethical and not the optimal strategy, but either way, you need constant activity, somehow. Due to the way it works, the fedi also attracts low attention span people. So "the message" needs to be condensed. But if reach is the goal, then it's the perfect tool for it, as far as I can see.