My apologies for the confusion.

In my original comment, I was talking about the term "tankie", which is a term we're seeing used a lot on Lemmy (a social media) to refer to people who support authoritarian governments (of countries, such as Russia and China).

In my reply to you, I meant to say that the effects of a Lemmy instance being "authoritarian" aren't at all as harmful to its users as an authoritarian country is to its residents, since it's easy to change instances but its not generally easy (and sometimes not reasonably possible) to change countries.