Most of the negative comments are from Lemmy.world users, which is the instance that recieves the bulk of the Reddit crowd before the users find a more fitting instance.
Lemmy.world tends to attract people from Reddit that are too ideological to stay, but want the same thing as Reddit without the enshittification, so they go to the largest generalist instance first. Over time, some leave for more specialized instances, like Beehaw, Lemmy.ml, programming.dev, or blahaj.zone, so that leaves .world usually with newer accounts, or people who just want Reddit 2 before it went to shit.
Not saying everyone from .world is bad, of course not, but what drives users to .world over more niche instances is usually coming straight from Reddit.
I joined Lemmy.ml because it looked like the largest generalist instance plus apparently ran by Lemmy developers. Here you list it as a specialist one. Well, I couldn't have known at the time. :D
It's a bit of both! It's an older instance, but it is focused on FOSS and Privacy. It isn't extremely specialized, of course, but it is not a pure generalist instance either.
Wait I am in this comment I left reddit and joined world then wanted to switch to a different one so just joined .ee arbitrarily. Is there a short reference somewhere of how these are all different from each other?
Here is a good spot to pick an Instance. You can stay with .ee if you want, but I recommend picking a new instance that fits what you personally prefer! You can also check what instances are federated with which other instances. For example, .world isn't federated with Lemmygrad or Hexbear, but .ml is federated with all 3, so you may wish to change your instance accordingly.
You can find it in the server list at the bottom of the website. Lemm.ee is pretty broad, as are most of the top instances.
Defederation isn't a bad thing. .world isn't federated with Hexbear and Lemmygrad because .world doesn't like Marxist-Leninists, for example, so it can help keep an audience curated. Lemmy.ml liked Marxist-Leninists, so it is federated with them.
What separates a "tankie" from a Marxist-Leninist? Is it just vibes? I got called a tankie for recommending a "leftist" to read Marx, specifically Critique of the Gotha Programme. Said leftist thought that the biggest factor of Capitalism is the employee-employer relationship, which is of course ridiculous, as that would mean feudalism is Capitalist, or even Market Socialism.
Since I get to see a lot of hexbear posts and comments as a lemmy.ml account, I can genuinely say that the biggest distinction between hexbear and lemmy.world, besides the fact that hexbear is explicitly leftist, is that hexbear users love to combat liberals and liberalism, often dogpiling on anti-communist takes, which .world sees as disruptive.
From my experience Hexbear isn't as much full of tankies as it is full of anti-west people. Depending on who you end up interacting with you might not even call them explicitly leftist. I don't see supporting Russian invasion of Ukraine as leftist, but you can find people in Hexbear supporting just that.
Hexbear isn't simply anti-west, but anti-imperialism. As in, Lenin's definition. As extreme shorthand, Lenin defines Imperialism as the point at which Capital has concentrated to the point of near monopoly so as to impact the state's decisions, a merging of bank and industrial Capital, export of Capital (not commodities), formation of international monopolies, and territorial division amongst the greatest Capitalist monopolies.
Following this, Russia does not hold the same extreme economic power internationally that NATO countries do, so while hexbear condemns Putin as a bourgeois dictatoraship and seeks an immediate end to the conflict, they also believe NATO as an imperialist power cornered Russia into making a move, provoking it.
Hexbear is usually anti-west because the West absolutely fits Lenin's definitions.
That's pretty much it, if you are familiar with Lenin and agree that opposing the strongest Capitalist powers is a good thing, you'll agree with some part of hexbear.
It's also worth noting that hexbear isn't simply Putin supporting, they would rather the Communist party rule Russia, but if they have to pick sides, they would rather support the anti-Imperialist side (again, Lenin's definitions) than the Imperialist side (yet again, Lenin's definitions).
Marxism predicted a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat during the proletariat revolution. Marxist-Leninism took the temporary dictatorship prediction and ran with it, establishing a permanent dictatorship of the communist party, which Lenin called the Vanguard Party.
There are Marxists that disagree with the idea of the Leninists' Vanguard Party and authoritarianism. Tankies, on the other hand, are the communists that support this idea of a permanent communist dictatorship and its authoritarianism, at least in a nutshell.
So I would say that most ML Commies are technically 'tankies', but not all commies are ML. A lot of commies are just M.
I'm aware of the allegations, I just think people who believe Marxism-Leninism is in contrast to Marxism are "anarchist-washing" Marx's actual writings and beliefs. See Critique of the Gotha Programme.
What separates Lenin from Marxism is the idea of a vanguard party, the concept of Democraric Centralism, and Lenin's analysis of Imperialism, not how long the dictatorship of the Proletariat might last. Additionally, Marxism-Leninism wants the DoP to last until there is no more Bourgeoisie, same as traditional Marxism, it doesn't mean that after that happens there is no government, just no means by which one class oppresses the other. Same as Marxism.
Marx, after all, refers to any Capitalist state as a Bourgeois dictatorship, regardless of the presence of Liberal Democracy. The dictatorship of the Proletariat just refers to the presence of a worker-state, a state democratically run by the workers, and that's what Marxism-Leninism proposes.
Basically, my point is that people that oppose Marxism-Leninism should usually also oppose Marxism itself, because they aren't really different. It's completely fine to be an Anarchist who accepts the analysis of Capitalism done by Marx and Lenin but rejects the statist nature of Marxism, but I do think that the idea of Lenin somehow going against Marxism is "anarchist-washing" of the statist nature of Marx himself.
It’s not that .world doesn’t like Marxist-Leninists, it’s that Hexbear likes to doglike over everything and well you can tell a lot about Lemmygrad by its name.
Someone once posted a graphic showing how each instance leaned politically and I thought it was pretty useful. Some more important distinctions between them are censorship, many will censor bad words or content they find objectionable and I just couldn’t tolerate how dumb that was so I picked a fairly anarchist anything goes instance.
Unfortunately you only get a good overview by being here a long time and paying a bit of attention to the seasonal drama. The biggest pointers, to my knowledge, would be that a lot of instances are defederated with lemmygrad and hexbear (but not all), because otherwise the bad faith campism and trolling gets unbearable, world is defederated with the piracy instance, and virtually every large server is defederated with "free speech absolutists" who let their instances fester with far right types.
Yeah it’s a bummer. When I left twitter for mastodon there was a full 180° from the attitudes people had. Unfortunately it seems that the outrage/negativity algorithm has trained Redditors too well to break those bad habits.
Oh yeah, absolutely. I’m not saying that obesity is good, but I also don’t think we can judge people for it. If someone is learning how to love themselves, who are we to stand in their way for it?
Maybe they need that self love to push them forward and lose that weight? Maybe not. Regardless I don’t think telling people how they should or shouldn’t dress will bring anyone any sort of good.
It’s that old saying “if you don’t have anything good to say, perhaps don’t say anything at all.”