I’m in the US and “lefty” might mean something different for me than it does for you. Where I live and the sites I go on - have leftys on there but no, they never use the term tankie.

As I mentioned, it’s used in discussion circles with leftists beyond center left (i.e. someone who’s more left than Bernie Sanders): Anarchists, Marxists, Maoists, etc. Lemmy might be the only site you go to that has a sizable proportion of these.

On Reddit, if you go to places like r/anarchism, r/socialism, r/stupidpol, you get to see it being used.

Annoying is an opinion yes, but I’m saying its annoying because of how often it is brought up.

It’s brought up a lot here because there are a lot of them on lemmy. You’d never hear people around your neighborhood complain about something that doesn’t happen in your neighborhood.

Maybe you are not seeing as many because your instance might block them. But I see them all the time is news articles about Ukraine or North Korea.

I see that there’s a discussion thread that goes on about this, not gonna get involved on that.

It’s a very common word in leftist circles. So if Lemmy is your first contact with leftists (beyond center left), then that explains it.

Being annoying is your opinion, but it’s not a buzzword that someone from gen z invented recently.

The term goes back to the 50s and 60s, hardly a buzzword.

Sorry to tell you, but you’ve been living under a rock.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie

Have a look at comments in any news article regarding Ukraine. They will simp for Russia just because they are not US allies.

A tankie is commonly used to refer to someone who blindly defends the actions of the USSR, China, North Korea, etc. Going as far as denying human rights abuses and genocide.

It’s not the same thing as woke.

Tankies.

You can’t have a discussion about anything without some tankie blaming it on Ukrainians / the west / capitalism, etc.

“Oh you stubbed your toe on the table? See, tables are oppressive furniture of the bourgeoisie. The Chinese government wanted to make all tables toe-stubbing resistent, but that would affect IKEA’s bottom line and the pharmaceutical industry’s profits. I have a source from tankiepeoplesmagazine to back this up.”

Russia is not even pretending to be communist anymore. It’s a full blown corrupt capitalist oligarchy. But just because it’s not an US ally, they will defend it.

I’ve always leaned left, and not in the “American Democrat” way. I’ve read Marx, Engels, Kropotkin, Luxemburg, etc. Not that I agree with them on everything, but they make good points.

But every day I see tankies defend Russia just because it’s not the US, I feel like I’m moving more center just out of spite.

I guess tankies are now making accounts in other instances so that they don’t get blocked.

I didn’t join the fediverse to have my data harvested.

Just check out any news article outside Lemmy.world on the Ukrainian war or China.

It always gets flooded by accounts from lemmygrad and hexbear doing mental gymnastics and whataboutism to justify whatever Russia or China are doing.

Never self-hosted Lemmy, but have self-hosted other things in the past. While you don’t necessarily need to code, you need a fair amount of code-adjacent skills. If you ever want to get into self-hosting, you should have a look into (at least):

• the linux command line
• ssh
• how ports work
• VPS providers
• DNS registrars
• nginx
• docker (while you don’t need it to host things, it makes your life 10x easier)

It makes sense in terms of reproducibility.

Imagine if your server gets compromised, you accidentally break it, or you just want to move to a cheaper provider or a different server. Do you want to have to tweak it all over again, and fix bugs that you figured out how to fix 6 months ago and you don’t remember?

I’d rather have some yaml files that do it for me. And it’s a new skill as well.

Docker is definitely worth the time investment.

If OP wants to go one level deeper: Ansible.