Yeah the fork is really new so I get why it seems that way. A tankie is a person who is a left wing authoritarian, to the point that they support Russia (I guess because of udssr history?) and china. Lemmy's main developers fall under that spectrum and one of the largest lemmy instances before the whole reddit api thing went down was lemmygrad.ml, where you get banned if you dare criticise the CCP. Thankfully most instances are deferedated from it.