The term Tankie has a clear definition that Cowbee likes to ignore:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those who support or defend acts of repression by such regimes, their allies, or deny the occurrence of the events thereof.
Join the lemmy.ml boycott today and help foster a better Lemmy-verse! No more posts, comments (except to counter their propaganda ofc!) or upvotes on any comms on the Lemmy.ml instance! To make this easy you can do an instance block at Settings > Block Tab > Scroll to bottom > Input “lemmy.ml” and apply
And consider donating to individual instances instead.
Check the megathread for more!
The Lemmy developers created .ml making it the “flagship” instance and giving it a high user count unrelated to it’s politics. I’ve also seen some people express fear of some sort of retribution if they defederate from ml, but I personally think that’s a bit overblown
Oh the retribution is real. ML are disgraceful humans. But they’ve got accounts on every instance, so the only thing an ml defed would accomplish is fragmentation.