I really only started to see the meaning of tankie start sliding once I got to Lemmy, and it goes in two directions; tankies who swear they aren’t tankies, they just have a lot of feelings about why the Uyghurs aren’t being mistreated, and liberals who literally think tankie is a synonym for leftist. (Seriously, if Lemmy has one unforgivable sin, it’s introducing the, “but her emails,” crowd to the word tankie.) Personally, I don’t care if I get tankies in my feed, but I’m not OK with instances that censor opinions they don’t like (I mean, assuming they’re not bigoted). Those mod logs are pretty damning, I’d like to hear from the .ml mods why they felt those weren’t legitimate discourse.

Honestly, my real takeaway from this whole mess is that it’s really dispelled the myth of federation as a silver bullet for all of social media’s ills. Federation was sold to me as a solution to overly-large internet communities, since federation would stop single communities from becoming too powerful, and communities could simply be defederated if they didn’t get along. Meanwhile, .world is whining that .ml’s communities are too large and important to lose, while .ml is bitching that .world defederating would be egregious and unreasonable. The whole thing feels more like a flame war between some large subreddits than the glorious online utopia that I was told federation would bring us. Actually, it feels a lot like the schism that started when r/antiwork fell apart.