I shared my fly.io Lemmy project to Hacker News and one of the first responses was “Lemmy is for tankies.”

This isn’t the first time I’d heard this either. In leaving Reddit and researching alternatives I’d heard it a fair amount.

I think it’s basically untrue; beehaw doesn’t even federate with the big tankie servers. But that seems to require some understanding of what Lemmy actually is.

So… what’s the best way to talk about it and/or get around this optics issue?

  • mustyOrange@beehaw.orgEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    They are communists of the authoritarian vanguard party kind (known as marxism-leninism). There’s different brands of socialism - some, like anarchists, prefer socialism to be focused around unions and decentralized aid groups, while others focus around using governments and vanguard parties. Tankies are of the latter variety

    They’re the kind of people to deny genocides of communist government

    • themobyone@beehaw.orgEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      So they are basically saying they would like to live under the regime of Stalin back in the day(or a modern analog). A society where it didn’t matter how left your were, or how correct you had been living all your life. If you were “in the way” for someone important with connections you and maybe your entire familie goes to the gulag.