It's sad to hear about how territorial lemmy is.

Not really territorial, more... despises authoritarianism in all its forms lol.

While I'm sure there are plenty of non-tankie .ml users, the problem is with the admins and mods being the biggest Tankies around who enforce the "Tankie ideology" throughout.

Go checkout .ml memes, anything posted that's Tankie-like will even sometimes get tons of downvotes as the post gets federated to non-Tankie instances but never removed.

Conversely, anything posted that's even slightly critical of China/Russia is quickly removed under the catch-all "Rule 1 bigotry" (You'll have to check the modlog for that)