The radicals in any society are attempting to drag the larger general populace in their desired direction. This is, in general, a thankless slog full of boring but necessary work. The successes that we celebrate, even the most drastic ones, are full of radicals who fell woefully short of their goals. It’s common for even large successes to feel like failures. Radical organizations, therefore, tend to have mechanisms in place to prevent burnout and maintain morale. In a scientific socialist project, those mechanisms can’t go so far as to delude people about the nature of reality, but there is still extent to which perceiving constant raw information about our situation under capitalism is psychologically damaging. These can be things like refocusing negative attention, being conscientious about previous successes, or assigning new members to projects where failures will be more tolerable.

When it comes to online “radicals”, that stream of information is curated to push people to more radical beliefs, but there is absolutely no capitalist incentive to establish the parallel social mechanisms: those which motivate action and inoculate from failure. To put it simply, capitalist social media has coopted radical communities and given them the tools to recruit while ensuring that they don’t develop the tools necessary for success and remain unmotivated.

One solution to this would be to partner socialist-run social media alternatives with physical organizations. This has not been tried because of the obvious doxxing risks, but a more decentralized version where organizations merely post their contact info in a dedicated place and wait for applicants may mediate those risks. Another solution, assuming that those organizations want plausible deniability from being associated with PR-negative posting communities, would be to establish community norms which encourage and reward meatspace praxis while teaching members to maintain their opsec.

The question of ability to cope and deal with failure is another question entirely. Solutions may come from the intersections of leftism with psychology, spirituality, and even ethical web design. What is abundantly clear is that the capitalism model of creating leftist revolutionaries is, unsurprisingly, seemly designed to inflict psychological pain.

For anyone looking to create a socialist alternative to social media, this question should be at the forefront of their minds.