If you wanna go pick a fight. Keep the instance name out of your damn mouth. Fight your own battles.
this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2025
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I've heard a few negative things about our instance, but they didn't vibe with what I read the instance was about, so it didn't bother me much. (They said we were known to be misogynistic. True, people like that may exist everywhere, but I didn't see it in the mission statement.)
I still don't fully understand what "tankie" means. I've heard it means authoritarian (as in, you're like the tanks rolling over people's rights) but I've also heard it can be sarcastic. So I ignore that in any context since it seems there isn't a clear consensus on the term yet.
I looked at this one and I looked at Shit Just Works and this one appealed to me a little more.
I feel like there are bad people everywhere. I think we're expecting too much when we say "Lemmy is better than Reddit." Lemmy is just built different. We're getting a lot of Reddit expats (I'm one of them) and switching communities does not change a person. I still field rude comments every day. (Yes, I'm aware if you see assholes everywhere you go, maybe you are the asshole.) I ignore them. If they're egregious, I also downvote them. I have no desire to engage with rude people anonymously on the Internet. I try to be civil but hey, nobody's perfect. I just try to be better... and nothing good comes with engaging with hostility.
I don't think it matters that much what instance you're on. I think a lot of people will join .world/.ml because they're common and that's fine, so they probably get a lot of jerks, but they probably also get a lot of intelligent and thoughtful people as well.
I dunno, I'm still learning.
In 2025, it just means "person who opposes the West." It doesn't even mean authoritarian or fake socialist anymore. India is technically a socialist secular democratic republic going by the Indian Constitution, but when's the last time you've heard people call Modi supporters tankies? Why do Assad supporters get called tankies while Modi supporters don't? The only meaningful difference between the two is that Assad and his supporters oppose the West while Modi and his supporters don't.
It's a silly term we use for Marxist-Leninists and their fellow travellers because we never bothered to really come up with a less silly term for that part of the left that holds that brutally repressing the working class into automaton-like obedience will (somehow) result in communism descending from the heavens like the Second Coming... it's an oversight on our part, I'm afraid.
Unfortunately, liberals have finally learnt of the term... so now they call everybody that isn't a liberal or a fascist "tankie," too.
Ironically enough, the term tankie was first coined by Marxist-Leninists themselves.
And it was never a useful term. Which should have been obvious, because it was invented by British communists who are more in the habit of arguing and splitting into 14 different progressively more transphobic groups than anything else (somewhat joking here, but the British left does have a history of splitting and of infiltration).
The term tankie refers to defenders of the use of tanks during the soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 to quell the anti-Soviet revolution taking place.
It's a pejorative term aimed at authoritarian Communists and pro-marxist-leninists by anti-authoritarian leftists.
That was my initial understanding (though, not so precise), but I've seen it disputed and I don't like to be vague with language if I can help it. It just sounds like a cute way to say fascist.
As for "tankie," it's essentially a pejorative for "communist." I recommend the Prolewiki article on "Tankies," as well as Nia Frome's essay "Tankies."
Divergence of the minds is to be expected anywhere and everywhere. And some will hold a different view solely to be different. Where people end up isn't always an informed decision or even a choice at times, so there will always be someone who "doesn't belong".
It's important to remember that the group and the individual shouldn't be conflated with one another. Anything living is in constant change, whether we recognize it or not and both individuals and groups can and will change over time.
Just as our representatives rarely represent us or our political parties rarely are what they present themselves as, so too does the location from which we make our presence known lack the precision to understand each own's individual identity.
Originally it was a label Trotskyites used to criticize Stalinists (aka ML's). A bit of inter-communist sectarianism.
But now we're 30+ years after the fall of the USSR, so its definition has spiraled into any westerner who opposes western imperialism. For example: an anarchist might use it to criticize an ML outright cheering Russian victories in Ukraine. In turn, a liberal will use it to criticize the same anarchist for opposing NATO.
This happens all the time and its infruiating
This used to happen to me all the time. I would start talking about imperialism and Iβd get called a tankie and told to fuck off. No longer consider myself an anarchist but still.
Tankie comes from when Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia in -68 IIRC. It was a brutal power move by the Soviet Union to squeeze the freedom out of people there who didn't want to live under the boot of Russia (which was the cornerstone of the Soviet Union).
People thinking this was not only okay but a good thing got named "Tankies" and today we use that for people being pro authoritarian communism.
Around here they dream up magic communist stuff and rewrites history a lot. So basically "not good people" IMO.
Anytime I hear someone call db0 sexist I open their account and see the insanity that they spout.
I think Lemmy culture is MUCH better than reddit. And I mean MUUUUUCH. Just as part of who we are. And the society is doing a good Jon of upholding those ideals.
And the fact that you made this comment should be proof of the cultural difference bw the two.
Better than reddit is a pretty low bar. I havent lived anywhere low enough to reach it without a shovel in years now.
Lemmy does have a misogyny problem. Haven't tracked per server.
I'm a man. So can't conclusively comment on it.
The sexism I've seen is so over the top, as the person talking about tankies here is. That it feels like obvious trolls or sarcasm.
I'm sure its there. But i would not have said Lemmy has a sexism problem had someone asked me.
But then again. No direct experience for me.
As an enby whoβs played around with both masculine and feminine pronouns on the lemmyverse, thereβs a more subtle strain as well. People assuming you donβt know things or explaining things to you excessively. Getting more DMs. And a kind of centering of cis men that still happens even in more feminist and trans-inclusive spaces within threads that cover certain topics.
Ah. Alright. Didn't know about that.
I don't doubt this at all.
But I think it's just lemmy being a reflection of real life rather than something that developed as part of lemmy culture, as well as lemmy culture inheriting from 
, where that kind of behavior is endemic.