So first, fans of an actually quite good (as I understand) leftist podcast got together on Reddit and started talking to one another.

The dark forces that are at work on the modern internet can’t have something like that, so they invested a pretty tiny amount of resources into sidetracking the whole thing into pettiness, vicious bad-spirited trolling, and slavish adherence to the stupidest and hot-button-est of hot-button leftism issues available. Because of Reddit’s unique combination of anonymity plus unchecked power for the (also anonymous) mods, it worked perfectly, and the whole place became a loud and hostile waste of time.

Still in waste-of-time form, the whole thing migrated over to Lemmy when Lemmy became available. It sits there festering, fueled by a combination of deliberate distortion by people who hate the left, people who just like having a community and stick around (avoiding the “bad” parts and politics), and people with some degree of mental illness who genuinely think Russia is good, attacking anyone who isn’t performatively left to the point of caricature is productive, and it’s everyone else who is the problem.

Because, by this point, the only people around are fairly dysfunctional, they had some kind of falling-out with the person who had paid for their web hosting, who for the same reason had chosen a corrupt registrar, who tried to extort them for thousands of dollars. They refused, the registrar presumably abandoned the effort when whatever counter-troll had bid the price up didn’t bother to buy it at the wildly inflated price it landed at, and they got back the original domain and restarted as if nothing had happened.