Too many people are confusing the two. Whenever lemmy.ml or its devs do something stupid, people go "Lemmy is getting worse and worse," or "I'm leaving Lemmy," or worse, "I'm leaving for Beehaw."
If you're using Beehaw, then you're using Lemmy. Lemmy is the software these instances run on. If you don't like lemmy.ml, join another instances that have rules that match your philosophy. Some instance hosts authoritarian or fascist shit? Turn to another Lemmy instance. Lemmy.ml is not even the biggest instance. People who just joined and are unfamiliar with the platform will just think the entire Lemmyverse is run by autocratic admins if we don't get our terminology right.
I actually haven't seen much mention of tankies on any Lemmy except as a joking reference here or there. I'm on lemmy.ml and the signup there said explicitly that it is a free software community. The signup had no particular reference to other politics, though I have no idea what is present in the admins' minds. There is also lemmygrad.ml which is explicitly socialist.
If you haven't seen tankies denying genocide and/or saying the victims brought it on themselves, then, I suspect you haven't been looking very far in the comments of the news community there, to be fair. There are a lot of posters who will defend Russia, China, Syria etc all day long. All their crimes are apparently made up by "western media", (as if Jimmy Dore's basement isn't in the west.)
Fortunately, they're getting super buttmad lately at being downvoted so much.
"leftists" nowadays who defend Russia seem extremely pathetic to me. The only thing Russia has in common with leftism is a general dislike for the activities of the United States. But there are many other groups who opposed the US, such as Nazi Germany, which doesn't necessarily make them your ally. As a Russian-american I can say that a lot of media and discourse on Russia in the west has incredibly poor overall quality, but it's not a CIA psyop, it's a combination of American exceptionalism, genuine issues, and zero cultural awareness.
I only see leftists defending Russia here and on Twitter. Internet is littered with those croks. Honestly been thinking in leaving social media as a whole. Would make me saner.
The trick is to curate your feed. Like a podcast? Find a community for that. Have a hobby or a hobby you are thinking of doing? Get some of those. You fill you feed with specific interest you like. If you want to check on news you specifically visit the that feed but you never join it or subscribe and you never look at the comments. Or you just read a newspaper. A proper one. If you want your social media to be fun you cant just doom scroll the r/all or whatever it's equivalent is called.
I know what tankies are. I just haven't encountered them much and haven't seen them discussed much on lemmy.ml. They were a running joke in a certain part of reddit which is where I first heard of them. If by "there" you mean lemmygrad, then yeah, it wouldn't surprise me, but if you're over there at all, you're sort of asking for it. I haven't had occasion to look there much.
Hmm ok. I've mostly been looking at news on lemmy.world and beehaw.org. There may have been tankie stuff on lemmy.ml that I didn't see.
I don't understand why there are so many lemmy news subs anyway. I begin to think this federation thing is just a single signon scheme for a bunch of separate forums. The fragmentation will likely make it impossible to catch up to reddit.
Today I've seen a "meme" (It was more of a drawn image) where they laugh about Ukrains committing suicide and portrait it as the right thing to do. That was on Lemmygrad though
Yes. Lemmy.ml is much more reasonable than most things I've seen posted on lemmygrad.ml. keep in mind I don't agree with either of them on overriding political ideology. But lemmygrad is much more in your face unapologetic and trollish about it. As far as lemmy.ml if you don't go into the specific subs pertaining to those issues you don't get heavily bombarded by it.
You are right. I'm on Lemmy.ml because it was advertised as a place to discuss Lemmy (the software) and FOSS in general, and for the most part that's exactly what I've seen here.