A tankie is a Soviet communist apologist/Stalin fetishist. Communism by itself isn't something you need to really defend in that way, as it just means that the plan is to distribute the means of production and decision making abilities. For example Tito in Yugoslavia held a multiethnic state in the fucking Balkans so well to the point that people still identify as Yugoslavs even if its not an ethnicity but a state affiliation for a country that hasnt existed for 30 years. Same thing goes for Greece, WW2 would have been a complete Nazi victory if the communist partisan militias hadnt held up the Italians and Germans for so long.

The thing with tankies is that they are too blinded by ideology to notice that the Soviets and Maoists were/are just Totalitarians in disguise.

A tankie is specifically an apologist for militant authoritarians who claim to be communists. There are many, many more theories of communism than Leninism and Stalin worship.

Shit, the Fediverse is functionally an experiment in anarchism.

Tankies get their name from the people in the West who still supported Soviet communism in the late 1950s and saw nothing wrong with the USSR sending tanks into Hungary to quell a worker uprising.

As long as they create their own spheres that aren't federated with this one I don't care. They'll probably run into the same problems as Voat did and get kicked by their hosters sooner or later.