Post trump memes to change the perception?

Well, if the people around you are more interested into left-shaming for supporting an open to everyone technology (You should remember them that Truth Social is a shameless fork of mastodon code) than trying to understand the true « free speech » potential of Lemmy / Mastodon, maybe you should move on and find some more suitable friends.

Since the pandemic I kicked off those « I’m not political but » people of my life and I’m way happier now.

The term "tanky" is actually new to me, and something I had to read up on. If anything, I find the way Lemmy is structured to be very appealing to anarchists, libertarians, communists, and conservatives alike.

It's just my opinion, but the perception of Lemmy is not universal, and seems to be from whatever vantage point people want to take. Rexxitors are valuing the "not run by Spez" and elements of community driven oversight free of investors, people banned from popular subreddits/Reddit itself seem to value the diverse moderators running different nodes, anarchists love being free from any corporate control and the "wild west" mentality of some instances, and conservatives will value any instance with free speech norms.

It's going to really amount to the instances as people learn more about it, rather than the framework itself.

Doesn't really help with the reputation among non-users, but I found myself much more comfortable with the platform and seeing dramatically less of the "Mao did nothing wrong" kind of extreme views once the instance I joined decided to defederate lemmygrad, maybe recommend an instance that does that? Lemmy.ml is also kinda concerning but at least there the typical user isn't really much of a problem, it's just the moderation policy there, so I just try to avoid the politics and news communities from that instance.

In the long run, I imagine that some instances will just end up setting up their own forked versions, I know the owner of my instance has been talking about doing that although i don't really know how that's going or how likely such a thing is to work out.

Yes, it will.