I never had a reddit account but joined lemmy when I heard the commotion and liked what I saw. Although I've never had a reddit account, I have lurked there, and you and many others here remind me of the typical reddit users who basically think the left begins and ends with the US democratic party and anything outside of that is "fringe".
Except I can look at your profile and see your first comments were four months ago no matter what you did on your profile in that specific instance to set your cake day.
My lemmy.ml account is meanwhile 3 years old without shenanigans.
It's not becoming. If anything, Lemmy became more milquetoast, Reddit liberal with the boom in .world accounts from the Reddit migration.
Not dissimilar to what happened with Reddit after the Digg migration where more "centrists" popped up and /r/conservative eventually grew, though Reddit was never leftist, just liberal with some right libertarian.
Correlation is not necessarily causation. A platform getting popular means people holding more mainstream opinions getting into the space, a lot of whom get offended when confronted with the unfamiliar. Now, when it comes to nazis, fuck them, they can get the fuck out with their hateful ideology, but I don't see why people are so strongly opposed to communists other than buying into propaganda vilifying them.
Except the fervent "anti-tankie" movement here is quick to label anyone to the left of a US democrat as "tankie" and is really aggressive about wanting to defederate from any instance they think leans in that direction.
I find it incredibly annoying. As you implicitly point out, calling everyone to the left a tankie is a great way to dilute the meaning of the word.
Someone who defends Russia for their actions in the Ukraine War and says the US/West or Ukraine is to blame deserves to be relentlessly derided. But communism in itself is hardly focused on something like that. It's just a subset of individuals who we should all be calling out.
Not sure how I reminded you of that because I don't think leftist thought is the norm at all. I welcome opposing thought, I just don't care for mindless spam of "tankies", which has been so broadly applied as to become a meaningless label. These reddit types swarm in and demand instances defederate in order to cultivate their preferred echo chamber.