Tankies are apologists for "communist" leaders such as Stalin, Mao and Kim. They love Russia, China and North Korea and will swear those countries can do no wrong. "Left" authoritarians... bootlickers.

Assuming you're not a tankie, I would guess it's your instance, which is the main one where all the tankies hang out lol

Tankie means someone who sometimes defends socialist authoritarian governments because they oppose the capitalist authoritarian governments.

They(we, sometimes, it's complicated) have a tendency to forgive the crimes of those socialist governments. Sometimes this is justified, because the accusations are false, invented by capitalist media as propaganda.

However, sometimes it's because we want to believe that the opposition to capitalism is always good and decent, when the truth is muddy and rather unpleasant: both sides suck in their own special ways, and you shouldn't put anyone on a pedestal.

Here in the fediverse, anarchist leftists or left-libs are the norm, so we tankies get dogpiled pretty often. A pox on all hierarchical governments seems to be the way here.

"Tankie" was originally a British slang term from the 50s.

In 1956, when the Soviet Union invaded Hungary, the British Communist movement was split over whether this action was cool, or sucked.

The people who thought it sucked derided their opponents who thought its cool, as "Tankies", because the images in the newspapers featured lots of photos of Soviet tanks rolling into Budapest.

After this, it stops being used for the most part, until it started being reclaimed by socialists online as a tongue-in-cheeck insult to throw at each other. Because, let's be real, it's a silly sounding word that's fun to say, and silly words are among the UK's biggest cultural exports.

Eventually though, Tankie breached containment and started to be used by people who had zero connection to any kind of socialist movement or history, and its meaning began to warp.

I've seen Marxists, even those think the Soviet invasion of Hungary was bad, called tankies. I've seen Anarchists called Tankies, I've seen right wing guys who love trad russian Orthodox Christianity called Tankies.

It's a word that doesn't mean much anymore. It's like when your grandpa calls Joe Biden "Pinko Scum"

Tankies are basically maga but for "socialism"

They don't have any actual values or morals and will happily support the most disgusting and heinous people that opress people, are racists wexist homophobic, that murder civilians and even commit genocide as long as they say they hate capitalism, and western imperialism.

It's basically a term people on the left use for people on the extreme outer-reaches of the left, typically unthinking, uncritical, and unreasonable supporters of bolshevism and authoritarian communism, and pretty much any oppressive regime that considers itself "anti-west."

They love putin, jinping, kim, assad, khamenei, etc.

They stylize themselves as "Marxist-Leninists" and your instance is full of them, so if you signed up unknowingly and aren't a tankie, people might just assume based on the ".ml"

But yeah, most people on lemmy are tired of arguing in circles with tankies, who typically rely on ad hominems, strawmen, sealioning, and other bad faith or uncharitable arguments to bully you into exhaustion. Some of them have to be bots or russian trolls, cause no one can honestly be so dense. It can feel like arguing with someone from r/conservative, just with the opposite opinions.