Btw, Tankies are a problem for adoption, on numerous occasions I have personally witnessed and others have witnessed as well that when the topic of Lemmy came up on MSSM such as Reddit the question of “Lemmy? Isn’t that just a place full of Tankies” always seems to come up.
So your anecdotes justify pre-emptively trying to exclude an entire category of people you lump in your head as "tankies"? How am I supposed to evaluate the entire fediverse based upon your personal feelings about the anecdotes you have had that involved the fediverse?
There has been research on almost the very thing you are talking about, and it clearly shows how the way people talk about the fediverse on reddit is extremely warped even before you bring in the deluge of bots faking human interaction. If you think that level of misinformation/disinformatiom is helped by fearmongering about tankies as soon as someone steps in the door you are a fool.
A new Mastodon user usually does not know which other servers their instance has cut ties with. A new Bluesky user often does not know which labelers their app trusts by default, or that a stranger curating a list can add their account and quietly lower their reach. When something visibly breaks (an account goes dark, replies fail to land), people often take the question to Reddit. The answers that come back vary, from accurate to confidently wrong.
Our study reads those public Reddit conversations as folk theories of federated moderation. We use “folk theories” in the same way the literature has used it since Eslami et al. [7]: everyday accounts users build from observation and shared discussion, rather than from inside knowledge of how a system works.