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?

  • WatTyler@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    7·
    2 years ago

    I believe it’s someone who is an idiot and an anti-capitalist. The kind of people who defend China’s genocide in Xinjiang or the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

    • Poitou@beehaw.orgEnglish
      7·
      2 years ago

      I just want to add that being anticapitalist does not suffice to make you a tankie, tankies are also apologists of authoritarian “anti-west” governments (Mao’s/Xi Jinping’s China, USSR, Ghaddafi’s Lybia, Putin’s Russia…)