Memes

The Chapotraphouse subreddit was radicalizing a lot of redditors when it was repeatedly hitting the front page of reddit fairly regularly and exposing people to counter-ideologies to liberalism that they never would have seen otherwise. Which is the reason why it (and then a slew of other popular lefty subs) had to be banned*. Despite all the lib-brained nonsense we have to constantly correct on this platform (the fediverse), there are an untold number of lurkers reading these discussions who are getting to see what actual leftist thought looks like when the narrow guardrails on the dominant narrative get removed. That exposure, especially when combined with witnessing the rapid intensifying of contradictions in their irl experiences, is enough to radicalize any thinking, genuinely open person. Lemmy being one of the few spaces on the internet where these things aren't hidden or removed on sight absolutely plays a role in a lot of users' leftward political evolution.

*It's also why the fed instances like .world and piefed preemptively defederate, block, and continuously slander and demonize all of the leftist instances. They are literally trying to mitigate the spread of leftism that is inevitable when exposure to thought that's outside the dominant ideology has a chance to get seen and voiced.