Welcome! So Tankies are what are known as authoritarian “communists”. They often praise authoritarian regimes so long as they’re against the West and claim to be communistic or similar. Such as China and Russia and also deny any wrong doings of them. Like, they’ll deny the events of tiananmen square, that people in China are heavily censored, that Russia was wholly justified in invading Ukraine or even that NK isn’t run by a Dictatorship.

They also often claim that they’re “the only true leftists”, even among actual communists/socialists that don’t praise authoritarian regimes that only vaugly claim to be communistic lol

.ml is one of the original Lemmy instances by the Lemmy devs who are hardcore tankies and they’ll enforce (though they’ll never admit it) their ideology throughout the instance by removing content that is against Russia/China/NK and claim it’s “bigotry” or something. They’re part of the Tankie Triad, the other 2 instances are Hexbear and Lemmygrad.

But those 2 are so in your face about it that most instances, including yours, defederate from them (When an instances admin decides to refuse to accept another instances content/posts/voting/users) But .ml opts to do it subtlety through moderator action and because they have a number of official support comms, other Instances are hesitant to defederate from them

You’re on !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works a comm mostly for the collection and documentation of their words and actions