Just blocked lemmy.ml from my Lemmy account, and I swear to god it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done on this platform. My homepage feels actually clean now.
For the past few months I’d been seeing a lot of tankie posting and pretty much far-left propaganda on my feed. It got tiring enough that I finally checked my blocked-user list, and realized pretty much everyone I’d blocked was from lemmy.ml. So I just blocked the whole instance instead.
Saying this as someone who considers themselves a leftist: I used to think Lemmy itself was an echo chamber. Turns out lemmy.ml was the problem the entire time. Probably the reason I tolerated it for so long is that I agreed with a lot of what they posted, but like an oversaturated meme, I’d had enough. Browsing the platform was starting to feel way too tiring instead of fun, which defeats the point of being here in the first place.
The breaking point was seeing some dude post a “meme” implying North Korea and China are basically communist utopias and that the West sucks. I mean, the West does suck, but come on - you’re saying North Korea is the ideal the West should strive for? What the hell…
Same. I don’t block anything and it’s perfectly fine tbh. So called “tankies” supposedly everywhere, but all I see are left-wing people.
As somebody who was able to see those before they got defederated: If they’re not denying stuff like that Russia is the aggressor, then they have improved and the common conscious is just slow to forgive.
It was “they must be trolls” levels when I still saw them. Pure ragebait levels. And you did often get the feeling that they were just trying to be as edgy as possible.
Yes. Because “tankie” is just a pejorative for anyone to the left of the western Overton window
What? Tankie is a term that came around to disparage communists who sided with the USSR in sending tanks to Hungary. It specifically means authoritarian Stalinish stuff
Nobody in the year 2026 is using the word tankie in the context of the internal disagreement between British Trotskyists and Khrushchevists about the Hungarian uprising in the 1950s. Even you immediately - one sentence later - pivot to claiming it must means “authoritarian Stalinish stuff”, which is both incredibly vague and has nothing to do with the Hungarian revolution; a term that can be used for anyone to the left of the western Overton window.
It feels like people are upset about running into users who are politically left-leaning… on federated social media.
That’s like being upset about encountering queer people in the arts, or chuds in the weightlifting space, or conservatives at the gun range. What the hell did you expect?