it might be your instance not being fed'd with them

Depending on the instance you are on and the blocks you have set up, your feed can be very full of the stuff

Is startreck.website federated with hexbear? When sh.itjust.workes got federated by hexbear a few days ago, about a third of all was tankie memes and discussion from hexbear. They mostly stayed to their communities, but sometimes I would come across comments on memes from .ml.

and I had to block all those hexbear communities, cuz suddenly they flooded my feed

I have seen my fair share of tankies here, so there definitely is a presence of them here. But I also do think a lot of the complaints come from people who assume any leftist user or post is also a "tankie."

Like I do see a lot of leftist memes posted to memes@lemmy.ml, which might be where a lot of the complaints are coming from. Likewise there has been a lot of drama with hexbear federating with a lot of communities that were previously shielded from them.

There was a wave of tankie on Reddit and here during the reddexit. It was like, “where the fuck did stalin/mao/pol pot loving, atrocity denying weirdos come from en masse?” But you’re right the shock was bigger than the phenomenon.

Blehh yeah it feels a little astroturfy, all the push to conflating leftists with china-loving authoritarians. Makes a man wonder if libs actually stand for anything at all.

My old neighbor's cat sounded like that a couple of times a year, good ol Meow Zedong.