I’ll start first: at the height of reddit going absolutely mad and frothing at the mouth I heard r/genzedong mentioned a lot as this evil evil tankie place, so I checked it out. Was a bit overly china fanboy-ish for my taste back then but alright overall and leagues more civil than people on other subs. So I started lurking over there to preserve my sanity until it basically became my most frequently viewed sub. I’ve kinda warmed up to the whole idea of socialism during my stay. And then it got quarantined. I’ve heard of lemmygrad even before the quarantine, so I switched to this place instead. As of this moment, lemmygrad remains my primary source of news and entertainment where I dont have to risk running into some flavour of wehraboo.
I’ve always been a leftist. In fact, I think I was always a communist, I just didn’t know it until a few years ago. I grew up hating most Republicans, and eventually I started hating Democrats too (I’m in the US so that’s about all we have to choose from), especially after what happened to Bernie Sanders in 2016. After Bernie’s run, and hearing many people talk about how he wasn’t a real socialist, I decided to look into what socialism actually was, because I agreed with Bernie on almost everything. I found I agreed with that even more than I agreed with Bernie. For a long time, I was scared to call myself a communist with all of the bullshit propaganda we are taught in the US, but eventually I got curious about that too and looked into how everything I knew about it was complete bullshit, and I never looked back.
As for how I found GenZedong, I forget if I found it on Reddit’s main page (before they took it off of there, for obvious reasons) or if someone in a communist org I used to be part of mentioned it to me. I found Lemmygrad from people expecting it to get banned from Reddit one day and offering it as an alternative.