My first months on Lemmy were spent on Lemmy.world, which was the biggest instance at the time. I had no experience with Hexbear because .world had defederated that instance. I sometimes saw it being described as a “tankie” instance, but it was nothing specific.
After I moved to .zip, I came across !games@hexbear.net, which seemed to be free from anything overtly political and reminded me of r/Gamingcirclejerk, so I subscribed to it and occasionally made comments related to gaming.
Today I made multiple comments to a post about an article on the STALKER game developers having removed the Soviet symbols and the Russian audio in the remastered edition of the game. I would argue that in the thread, there were no comments from me that could be construed by a reasonable person as defensive of Nazism, fascism, or even hinting at it. For example, in one of the comments, I linked a Ukrainian law that prohibits the use of Nazi symbols, though I highly advise looking through all my ten comments as to avoid any misunderstanding or false impressions.
Conversely, one comment posted by another user dismissed Holodomor as Nazi propaganda, which I reported, but a moderator of that community just ended up calling me out for that and taking no action, followed by them banning me.
The thread containing all of my untouched posts is still available via lemmy.zip. My comments are also available for viewing via my user page. They are not available on hexbear due to the ban.
I know. The same thing happened with The_Donald. It started out as a meme space. It’s where Donnie as “The God Emperor” all started. But then people actually started taking it seriously.
So I guess we have Reddit to blame for the situation that America is in right now.
Thanks Reddit!
In the comments to their repost of my post here, they’re mocking my use of the word politics, but it’s all twisted like you described. On Gamingcirclejerk, it’s used satirically to mock bigots who say that people of color, trans people or women are political and thus unwanted in video games, but here in the Hexbear reading I’m suddenly the same as those people for not expecting a gaming community to be about the actual politics of authoritarian communism.
alot of cities, or regions were infiltrated by other right wingers, or tankies in the subreddits.