im just shooting that down outright, what about the devs or the server they run matters?

It matterd because the servers those devs run with their heavy pro authoritarian red fascist moderation and cultural bias were the two largest instances, the flagships, both by virtue of their size and their official nature. That size means they influence users' overall experience of the lemmy network's culture and atmosphere via posts and comments and votes, so yeah, you can sign up for a different instance and that local community won't have that atmosphere and those moderation problems but you're still connected in the network to the tankies and the tankies have the largest and most dominant instances so they have the most effect on the content of the network, and you can't completely avoid them except by deferating and basically hamstringing yourself by separating from the two largest instances.

Thanks to Beehaw and especially lemmy.world though, I think this is rapidly changing and won't be a significant problem for much longer, although there is the remaining concern that the developers' biases will show through in how they develop the underlying lemmy server software. For instance, unlike Mastodon, right now there is no way for you as an individual to block an entire instance, and I foresee it possibly being difficult to convince the lemmy developers to allow that, since one of the hallmarks of Marxist-Leninist ideology is a focus on mass movement building where everyone is forced to interact and join this one giant movement, even with people they don't like or can't get a long with, which could make them hostile to allowing more freedom of association in the fediverse. I'm already seeing tankies from lemmygrad accusing instances that defederate from them of sectarianism and endangering the "movement", in fact.

red fascist authoritarian regimes

Do you include Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Vietnam, Laos, Nepal, etc in that? Is there a type of "red" (marxist) that you don't call a fascist?

I have some memory of you being reasonable when actually presented with arguments. I would strongly encourage you to try to actual talk to these people that you speak about in such strong pejoratives, perhaps by asking them non-presumptuous questions. I think you will find that they have more to say than you give them credit for.

The people running beehaw are extremely dishonest about this issue, citing "hate speech" as a reason for defederation with platforms that aggressively ban and remove hate speech, including the only instance I know of that actually displays pronouns with the username (Hexbear.net , which they preemptively banned).

They are better off picking another instance anyway, enough people are joining lemmy.ml at the moment. I hope that the way things have taken off during the last few days show people that Lemmy is a diverse community, just like Reddit was.

To be fair, while they might not know the term, encountering someone unironically defending North Korea or such probably would still make one uneasy.

I literally just found out what that word means because of Lemmy

It's a silly meaningless word

It's niche political drama, and it doesn't really affect the development of Lemmy.

Same thing "woke" means to conservatives, except it's used by liberals instead - absolutely anything they want it to mean in any given situation.

It's deployed by people generally referring to any kind of marxists that have anti-imperialist politics, but I frequently see it used by liberals against even anarchists if they're not pro-nato.

It is complete garbage, should be ignored, and the people using the word derided as cranks. Once you start to realise that their behaviour is exactly the same as the people that scream about the "woke" all the time you realise how ridiculous it is, they filter EVERYTHING through hating the "tankies" (which can mean anything in different situations remember) in exactly the same way.

A tankie is a leftist who doesn't agree with mainstream geopolitical opinions or shows any interest in nuance

Tankies [1] don’t usually believe that Stalin or Mao “did nothing wrong,” although many do use that phrase for effect (this is the internet, remember). We believe that Stalin and Mao were committed socialists who, despite their mistakes, did much more for humanity than most of the bourgeois politicians who are typically put forward as role models (Washington? Jefferson? JFK? Jimmy Carter?), and that they haven’t been judged according to the same standard as those bourgeois politicians. People call this “whataboutism” [2], but the claim “Stalin was a monster” is implicitly a comparative claim meaning “Stalin was qualitatively different from and worse than e.g. Churchill,” and I think the opposite is the case. If people are going to make veiled comparisons, us tankies have the right to answer with open ones.

The reason we “defend authoritarian dictators” is because we want to defend the accomplishments of really existing socialism, and other people’s false or exaggerated beliefs about those “dictators” almost always get in the way — it’s not tankies but normies [4] who commit the synecdoche of reducing all of really existing socialism to Stalin and Mao. Those accomplishments include raising standards of living, achieving unprecedented income equality, massive gains in women’s rights and the position of women vis-a-vis men, defeating the Nazis, raising life expectancy, ending illiteracy, putting an end to periodic famines, inspiring and providing material aid to decolonizing movements (e.g. Vietnam, China, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Indonesia), which scared the West into conceding civil rights and the welfare state. These were greater strides in the direction of abolishing capitalism than any other society has ever made. These are the gains that are so important to insist on, against the CIA/Trotskyist/ultraleft consensus that the Soviet Union was basically an evil empire and Stalin a deranged butcher.

https://redsails.org/tankies/

It originally was used to describe Leftists supporting authoritarianism while claiming to be leftist. It was used originally to describe Marxist-Leninist members of the Communist Great Party in Britain who supported the use of tanks by Soviets to quell a couple of uprisings in the late 50s and late 70s. It has since evolved as a term since then to include Leftists (or maybe not even leftists anymore, it's getting thrown around a lot now) who support similar actions in China and Russia. Usually they have an obsession with Mao and/or Stalin and China can do no wrong in their mind while claiming the western world is evil.

The term has an interesting history (to me as I'd describe myself as leftist, but I look at is as we all suck and can all improve) and Wikipedia has a decent article on it that I pulled most of this info from to double check my memory. Unfortunately they tend to be the most vocal part of leftist communities so I just tend to ignore any of them...

AFAIK It's people who are pro-russia/china and vocal about it.

Alright since there is a claim here that you are cool with political opinions being voiced, I'm gonna assume that you mean this, and you're not just saying so.

Now since you say that you are pro-left/socialist, I'm gonna assume that you are aware that the west/The US has lied in the past about other countries, and their atrocities? (Iraq, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc.) Please follow me here, read, and then judge afterwards. I'm not asking you to believe me fully after a single post, I'm just gonna give you some articles from providers that you probably trust, and I'm going to let you form your own opinion afterward.

Tiananmen Square:

1. The Telegraph reports on WikiLeaks source, that there was no actual bloodshed inside Tiananmen Square. Read the entire thing, there is of course nuance. Link is through 12ft to get around paywall

2. The BBC admits to being wrong about a lot of their reporting. Quote: "There was no massacre on Tiananmen Square."

3. Interview with one of the protest leaders of the Student Protest movement. He is still critical of the Chinese government. He says that there was no tanks in Tiananmen Square, and that it is dangerous to lie just to try to win.

Now these are just the sources that explain this. If you look far enough you will also find pictures of dead Chinese soldiers burned to a crisp, strung up by the neck. These pictures are hard to look at. But maybe you think that the protest was just. Okay. But please understand that even western media does not actually think there was a massacre in the Square.

I'm gonna let someone else handle The Holodomor, as I don't have extensive western sources ready for this one, and I kinda have to get some things done. But understand that a lot of us here used to believe exactly what you do. Then we read a lot about the history of these places, and came to a different conclusion. We are not just people who love murderers in here, we have come to our conclusions through a lot of reading, and a lot of discussion. We are critical of the USSR, China, etc. but we try to be nuanced about this. We understand that a state over decades will do bad things, and we try to learn from this, and try to prevent it from happening again. But it is sometimes a little funny to pretend that we are much more extreme than we are IRL, because liberals are a little funny when they get mad. Sorry, but that's the truth.

Another user, holygon, posted from an instance that lemmy.ca blocks and someone else requested a lemmy.ml account repost it. If you want my own opinions, ask and I'll discuss it, but on this comment everything forward is from that user:

Alright since there is a claim here that you are cool with political opinions being voiced, I’m gonna assume that you mean this, and you’re not just saying so.

Now since you say that you are pro-left/socialist, I’m gonna assume that you are aware that the west/The US has lied in the past about other countries, and their atrocities? (Iraq, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc.) Please follow me here, read, and then judge afterwards. I’m not asking you to believe me fully after a single post, I’m just gonna give you some articles from providers that you probably trust, and I’m going to let you form your own opinion afterward.

Tiananmen Square:

1. The Telegraph reports on WikiLeaks source, that there was no actual bloodshed inside Tiananmen Square. Read the entire thing, there is of course nuance. Link is through 12ft to get around paywall

2. The BBC admits to being wrong about a lot of their reporting. Quote: “There was no massacre on Tiananmen Square.”

3. Interview with one of the protest leaders of the Student Protest movement. He is still critical of the Chinese government. He says that there was no tanks in Tiananmen Square, and that it is dangerous to lie just to try to win.

Now these are just the sources that explain this. If you look far enough you will also find pictures of dead Chinese soldiers burned to a crisp, strung up by the neck. These pictures are hard to look at. But maybe you think that the protest was just. Okay. But please understand that even western media does not actually think there was a massacre in the Square.