I'm new and missed the lore

Basically, .ml Tankies (I don't consider all .ml users to be Tankies just because they're a .ml users) are authoritarian bootlickers “communists” pretending not to be who routinely deny the human rights violations of the CCP/Russia and hold them up as the gold standard. They refuse to recognize China, Russia and even NK as being authortarian regimes or if they do, its OK/Neccessary because it takes down the west/capitalism. If you have a historical fact that puts any of those countries in a bad light, they’ll probably deny it happend or is just “western propganda.”

So they believe and spread things like the Russia narratives on Ukraine (When it happened they were parroting the whole “special military operation” thing, the current thing is that it was “just a diplomatic maneuver to bring Ukraine to the negotiating table”)

Hex and Grad are very in your face about it, but .ml tends to be more subtle, often opting instead to remove dissenting comments and ban users before letting threads get out of control. So, as a result many instances defed from those 2.

.ml is run by the head Lemmy devs who are, unfortunately, hardcore Tankies themselves and tend to enforce the Tankie mindset throughout with more subtlety through mod/admin action. Or allowing known propaganda outlets to fester

You can check out !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works if you want to see some documentation of their actions, words and censoring. What I've linked here is but a mere sampling of what's been collected there