this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2025
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MeanwhileOnGrad
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"Oh, this is calamity! Calamity! Oh no, he's on the floor!"
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Meanwhile On Grad
Documenting hate speech, conspiracy theories, apologia/revisionism, and general tankie behaviour across the fediverse. Memes are welcome!
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Is it just .ml or is most of lemmy instances run by tankies?
There is a lot of Anti-US posts.
Some are EU-flavored (which I'm fine with).
But then you have a lot of pro-PRC flavored types which is just cringe. Like "I'd rather trust China" or "I'm rooting for China against the US" some BS, like.... ?!? 🧐
The EU is right there! Why choose China when you literally have a functional democracy elsewhere?
There's just a covert (not that covert actually) operation trying to promote China as this some sort of beacon of prosperity, and some even start to belive that China has "free healthcare" like what lmao
Like... Anti-US post are fine, just don't promote China as a replacement, its not any better.
EU is like "hooray we banned curved cucumbers!", and china is like "we built 48,000 km of high speed rail in 2 decades"
I mean that's because they didn't have those before? Most of the EU already has had functioning rail systems since the introduction of trains. Also China is one country, while the EU is 27 separate entities. Ofc it can't just wholesale upgrade the continent's rail systems.
Like, I wish tankies would actually visit China instead of stating development statistics about the place. It's a beautiful country with an amazing diversity of culture, language, and delicious food, but everything tankies repeat on here is sooooo clear in it's Han/Mandarin/Beijing supremacy. Like literally they are spreading Han-Chinese propaganda as "communist" talking points.
Sorry, I wasn't trying to troll you, and I should've been more verbose in my reply, I was just pointing out that comparing EU and China is a bit funny to me (as someone that lives in an EU country). Generally I'm not pro-authoritarian, but I can see things from a tankie perspective that they get shit done. Horrible society for free thinkers of course, no doubt about that.
Not only .ml but not most of them
But then, it’s not just about the tankies. Most instances have their own definition of what is fine and what isn’t, and if you don’t believe what everyone else does, you’re going to get banned
its problematic when the instances are solely political based, and there are puritanical tests.
so, a lot of instances on lemmy
you'll be the nazi, the fascist, the liberal, the tankie, the leftist, the transphobic, the woke... of a group, and they'll hate you for it. You're not one of those? Doesn't matter, they'll call you something because you don't agree with them, and that will be their way of discrediting you
It's bound to happen when the admin team contains at least one person that voices their opinions, unless they're really willing to be open
This community is no exception.
It's mostly the Tankie Triad consisting of Hexbear, Lemmygrad and .ml
I tend to focus on .ml because Hex and Grad are generally defederated from by most major instances because they are even more extreme than .ml on top of the fact that there's a perception among instances that if they defederate from dessalines' (head Lemmy dev, main .ml admin) .ml instance there will be retaliation in the form of pull back of technical support for their instance (Which, yea, I could totally see him doing that)
There are some communities and some users who also lean tankie. !world@lemmy.world is often pretty crazy, and I have the feeling some users of slrpnk and dbzer0 also go nuts from time to time
dbzer0 has a ton of great communities but they've had some real weirdo niche mods come to light lately. I'm hoping they address it, it'd be a change of pace from the general admin approach on lemmy which can feel extremely hands-off on most instances.
What’s a decent lemmy instance? The ones named above are the ones I use lol.
slrpnk and dbzer0 are both fine, and .world is a bit fractious but still quite solid. Blahaj is good too! Really the only instances I'd suggest avoiding are Hexbear, Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad
people are fine, as long as they dont visit the main politics.world communities, or anyof the affiliate. there some semi-wierd pro-ziolnist thing going on.
I was permabanned from the political and news subs for writing, WITH REPUTABLE SOURCES, Russia's election meddling AND for saying feminist things. I spoke with the mod who banned me publicly and he was unable to support his ban based on the rules, but kept it intact. Those subs imo are compromised by their mods
yea i just skim those subs, prior to being purged as effort by reddit to reduce user numbers on the site. too easy to get into conflict with trolls and get yourself banned.
Blahaj 😂
That must be one of the most authoritarian ones. Not tankie, but the lgbt tankie equivalent
Got any examples? Blahaj was founded on the principle of protecting trans people, and I have yet to see anything here that people are claiming as mods abusing their power that didn't turn out to be people getting upset about being banned for being transphobic.
There's definitely some tankies here, but the biggest complaint I have about Blahaj is that you can't see downvotes so the most controversial posts can look like the most agreed on takes.
That's exactly the thing: bans for transphobia are often about non-transphobic speech. Not agreeing on specific subjects doesn't mean one is transphobic. Thinking a cisgender person can have an opinion on laws or regulation regarding transgenders is not transphobia. Having your feelings hurt over an opinion while you are a trans doesn't make it transphobia. Transphobia is hate speech.
Source: I have been instance-banned from blahaj on an older account. Maybe twice? Not sure. I'm not willing to share the accounts' names, but I try to respect my instance bans. Don't want to interact there anyways
spoiler
people will assume I'm transphobic because they know me better than myself, apparentlyI mean, it's more that you say inherently transphobic things like:
that shines some light on the potential reasons you might have been banned from the instance.
Inherently transphobic? You’re just assuming and extrapolating
Don’t assume it’s malicious, they might just not know. Aren’t we here to discuss? Being wrong doesn’t mean I should be banned, but I should be corrected. Closing debates when I’m respectful isn’t useful to anyone
I just like to question things, not take and accept them just because the person is concerned by the topic, especially if they have a sensibility or opinion on the subject
The problem is you're approaching interaction with the assumption it's appreciated - but Blahaj isn't set aside as an educational space, it's a queer space - and people coming in and retreating to just asking questions when challenged is a really tired trope. You can be unfamiliar with a topic yes, but people are under no obligation to explain themselves or engage in a discussion with you just because of that. Calling a group "LGBT tankies" because you don't understand this may be justified under your own guiding principals, but it comes across as the same kind of petulance as when incels encounter a women's-only space.
You're mad because you were banned, and you have a history of expressing transphobic opinions regardless of your internal motivation. It seems pretty straightforward what happened here.
Well yea, if you don’t want to debate, don’t. Don’t falsely claim the person is transphobic if you don’t know. Don’t censor the message. If you do, don’t be surprised that I call you authoritarian and full of shit
You invested an history of things I haven’t done. If you believe what I have said is transphobic, then you have a problem and are actively engaging in defamatory speech. You keep assuming stuff about me which I partly what I’m calling out
Sadly, safe spaces often turns out to be safe for some people, and xenophobic of other people. Authoritarian people thrive there and confirmation bias is king
Not being able to discuss in a community focused on this subject is really sad. I would never recommend an instance or community where only a single opinion is allowed
You just said a transphobic thing, though. It's in the quote I used. That thing you said is transphobic, ergo you have a history of saying transphobic things.
You're either misunderstanding or misrepresenting what I said. You're welcome to engage with discussion within the community (well not you specifically because of the ban), but there's no obligation for the community to educate you just so you'll feel included. Just like I'm not interested in litigating the details of why 'asserting that you would consider a hetero relationship containing a trans person to be a gay relationship' is transphobic.
It's not an unfair assumption to assume that what someone tells you they believe is, in fact, what they believe. You have expressed transphobic views, so since the only information I have with which to judge you is based on what you've expressed, I can safely take you at your word that you at very least hold the transphobic opinion you have said you hold.
I suspect your inability to accept that rejection based on the things you say doesn't automatically entitle you to defend yourself is also part of the reason for your instance bans.
Again, you're just assuming bad intention. So I guess I must do the same with you? What if my question is legitimate? How can you know I'm just trying to piss of people? You're just persuading people that I'm acting in bad faith, and I'm not.
Still can't see any quote. What exactly is transphobic?
Just a sign of a bad community, but you do you. You're free not to interact.
Then, can you really blame me for calling this out because I believe it's not transphobic and you're just censoring people and bullshitting?
So believing a person is homosexual if they like trans people with the opposite gender but same sex is transphobic? I think we can stop now, there's no point in arguing. You just have a vastly different definition of transphobia from mine. I thought it was the hate or discrimination of trans people.
This is just fucking dumb and depressing. You're creating enemies that aren't there. Congrats.
I loathe quote-replies, but like the saint says...:
Nnnnno... no I'm not assuming anything about your intention, just your message. You've apparently conflated "you've said this transphobic thing" with "you must be a transphobe". To be honest I think you're probably well meaning, you just show a real lack of social skills and you treat criticism as an attack on you personally. To be clear, I don't actually care what your intention is in saying transphobic things, only that you've said them. That's been the explicit thesis of every one of my responses.
In order:
I don't actually know how to make this more explicit, I'm going to be uncharitable and assume this was just you being truculent (since you go on to respond to the quote in question, this too seems like a fairly safe assumption)
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here (sorry)
Yes. It inherently implies that biological sex is their (in this case literal) defining feature, disregarding their gender - which is the much more important aspect of a person in every situation except medicine. It's the exact same rhetoric being used by transphobes the world over to justify all their horrendous oppression.
Discrimination being "The ability or power to see or make fine distinctions", your categorization of people based on the fine distinction of the interrelation of their gender expression and sex is very literal discrimination - and by your definition, that's transphobia.
Please stop trying to make this about me characterizing you as anything but a rude person that has having difficulty accepting that even well-intentioned people can hold transphobic views, and that bringing said views into a space regardless of intentions is bringing transphobia into a space where it's wildly and explicitly unwelcome. I don't care about you enough to be doing anything more than that.
dbzer0 is ostensibly an anarchist instance, but it is often the kind of anarchy which is cozy with tankies and is otherwise very attached to one particular brand of anarchism that aligns with a lot of the tankies' anti-west, anti-enlightenment ideals.
anarchist's often fall into the trap of being useful idiots for tankies because they both have the first step of tearing down current power structures.
happens all too often
Kronstadt, Russian Civil War, Mao