It’s one thing to have differing views, but I’ve seen enough attempted reddit migrations to be relieved that the popular communities in the fediverse so far haven’t been about crazy racist stuff or other extreme right bullshit.
I am also glad that I’m getting away from reddit’s general political shitposting, which was more left leaning. You couldn’t have any proper discourse on there, and even I with my generally more left leaning views recognized that.
I mean, there instances that exist as havens for far right folks. But they are not defeated with the bulk of the instances. See the exploding heads thing.
And main original dev is apparently a “tankie” which appears to be a communist apologist of some kind. For this part I’m just reporting what I’ve seen others say. I know nothing about him myself.
A tankie is a Soviet communist apologist/Stalin fetishist. Communism by itself isn’t something you need to really defend in that way, as it just means that the plan is to distribute the means of production and decision making abilities. For example Tito in Yugoslavia held a multiethnic state in the fucking Balkans so well to the point that people still identify as Yugoslavs even if its not an ethnicity but a state affiliation for a country that hasnt existed for 30 years. Same thing goes for Greece, WW2 would have been a complete Nazi victory if the communist partisan militias hadnt held up the Italians and Germans for so long.
The thing with tankies is that they are too blinded by ideology to notice that the Soviets and Maoists were/are just Totalitarians in disguise.
A tankie is specifically an apologist for militant authoritarians who claim to be communists. There are many, many more theories of communism than Leninism and Stalin worship.
Shit, the Fediverse is functionally an experiment in anarchism.
It’s ironic that one of the main points of Marxist communist theory is that communists shouldn’t actually need to do anything to make communism come about, that it will just be a natural evolution of a capitalist economy over time. And now it’s wound up being used as a synonym for totalitarianism.
Tankies get their name from the people in the West who still supported Soviet communism in the late 1950s and saw nothing wrong with the USSR sending tanks into Hungary to quell a worker uprising.