Soon after I joined Lemmy a few years ago, I searched for communities based on my interests and subscribed to the ones with the highest numbers of users to ensure they are active. Sometimes I joined multiple, but then saw that some people post the same thing to more than one, cluttering my feed, so I left the smaller ones.
It's only after my community ban from !games@hexbear.net for disagreeing about Ukraine that I was told about MeanwhileOnGrad, learning exactly what "the tankie triad" means and why big Lemmy instances have defederated from those. Lemmy.ml, where the ML probably stands for Marxist-Leninist, seems to have been defederated by fewer, possibly because it's run by the creator of Lemmy, Dessalines. Nevertheless, there is evidence of Dessalines holding the same authoritarian communist views as the rest.
Recently, there were two posts on !privacy@lemmy.ml about Signal, but then in both cases, admin davel (who is known on MoG for seeing CIA's hand in running Ukraine, among other things) and Dessalines linked (1, 2, 3) the same article by Dessalines, which not only argues Signal could be a CIA honeypot (as if it matters when proper e2ee is used), but also manages to shoehorn China even into that, claiming its government "prefers autonomy". This sort of portrayal of totalitarianism as sovereignty is the reason I unsubscribed from the community. As it has been said by others, ML is not a neutral instance but a means of pushing authoritarian views onto unsuspecting users.
Edit: Made the post title clearer.
What portion of the tankie userbase do we think are Chinese intelligence assets? Or at best, shills?
The down vote shaping on this thread I think supports this notion. It's something that I have seen and personally experienced on Reddit. And, it seems that liberal left wingers are invariably the target.
My experience has always been that tankies, regardless of community, are exceedingly rare in the wild of a western nation. With leftist views usually comes compassion, and that prevents the development of authoritarian views.
There is something wrong with the proportions on Lemmy. There's more going on than fringe local western tankies. Perhaps Dessalines insistence that Signal was a honeypot, is a projection about Lemmy.ml?
I don't know if borders on tinfoil to call Lemmy.ml a honeypot. I think if you're China, and your goal was to destabilize American/Western politics by poisoning the well of discussion amongst it's citizens, it seems natural to just... let Lemmy.ml continue doing its thing. A honeypot is for baiting and trapping a target, it's what you would do to catch CSAM predators. You eventually capture and prosecute them.
But for long-term destabilization of a generation of people, you just stand up a bunch of bad faith actors and let them post their heart out for a couple years. Eventually, your posse will have brainwashed actual citizens into repeating your (and coming with their own) propaganda.
So Dess and his ilk may not even have to be Chinese intelligence agents, they could just be extremely railroaded Westerners. But I don't care enough about them to get even close to doxxing territory.
Edit: And for the record, Russia pulled the same stunt back in 2014-15 with the Alt Right. Both nations could very well be standing up bad faith actors pretending to be Fascists and Marxists at the same time, and that would be an efficient strategy.