I must admit I mostly lurk there and never quite made the jump culturally to lemmygrad, but I do respect your opinions and the last few days are making me feel a bit insane and wanting an outside perspective. I'll explain and provide links for context
A longtime user got banned for bad behavior in live chat on hextube. That part isn't all that surprising. But then we got dueling impersonators one and two making meta posts about the ban and a notorious also-banned user he had conflicted with a long time ago (melina).
This was... mostly just annoying, clearly someone was doing a nasty bit, but mods just banned them both and the site moved on which I guess is fair enough.
Fast forward to today, and we have an account (not brand new, but not a longtime account either, only a few weeks old with limited post history) purporting to be our resident China guy (and China doomer, to some extent) from the news mega, posting a long winded story about going to xinjiang and getting 1984'd or whatever. It starts to feel like it could be a bit as it gets more and more absurd, but this user was always very serious from what I recall.
If this is a troll/psyop I guess it's a good one because this garbage is giving me a fucking headache. What do you grad'ers think is going on? Were any of these real or all impersonators (and relatedly who? melina?) Am I just too autistic to get the joke? Is this a fed psyop? what else could be going on?
If its like Chapo Traphouse it was never meant to be a serious site & they didn't even care that the domain was expiring. The only serious leftist of Chapo is Matt Christman. The others come off as wealthy irony posters that don't care much about any movement or history. Maybe people should come to one of the actually serious lemmy servers that has memes as well as reading groups and history posts and contribute to them.
I don't think we model ourselves after chapo anymore basically for the reasons you stated. But yeah it has gone really downhill and it makes me glad there are certain federated instances I can see. They hold down the fort when hexbear is getting particularly out of pocket.