Some of the history of Lemmy so far.

The people hosting lemmy ml are also hosting the instance lemmygrad.ml You can look around there. Those are tankies.
- What's the point of specifically looking for the tankie instance just so you can say See? Lemmy is overrun by tankies. At that point it looks like you're just trying to get outraged.
  The amount of content I've seen on the front page endlessly crying and whining over these evil tankies far exceeds the amount of tankie content I've run across involuntarily, which remains at a staggering 0.
  It's got big “And are these tankies in the room with us right now?” vibes tbh.
It’s the same picture
- Nah, I use Linux (for some things, anyhow) and am a far more moderate lefty than some that I’ve seen around Lemmy thus far.
Contral, overeach
Tbf the Venn diagram of that is a circle within a circle, so...

Okay, I’m clearly ignorant. What’s a “tankie”?

Short answer: folk who are so pro-Communist that they think the Tiananmen Square massacre was a good thing. The massacre in which the CCP bulldozed protestors with tanks.
Hence, "tankie"
Edit: apparently I'm wrong on the origin of the term, and it predates Tiananmen Square. See the reply below.
I will add that given the current projection of power currently, China is a far more powerful authoritarian communiststate than Russia, so most tankie propaganda is China-centric these days.
- That's a wrong answer.
  It's in relation to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia during the Prague spring, where they were doing evil things like giving people more freedoms and not having everything under centralised authoritarian state control so the soviets sent over some tanks to kill people and enforce their imperialistic control over the country.
  Ironically enough doing more to encourage actual communism than the larpers in Russia ever did.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
  In your defence, it's confusing trying to keep track of who these authies murdered with tanks.
- Well, the tanks in question are actually those sent by the USSR to crush the Hungarian Revolution and Prague uprising.
- Oh wow. So like, extreme right wing and the fucking Republicans. Fuck all those people.
- I haven't seen this yet outside of pro China forums.
- Tankies aren't leftists. They simp for genocidal far right dictatorships.

If they keep it to themselves, it shouldn’t be a problem.

If they ban and censor users because of those views though…

Don't know how true it is, but I saw a post claiming that they were banned for criticizing the CCP.

Of you think lemmy.ml is tankie you are not ready for lemmygrad lmao .

Can I go now?

So are there any real downsides to having an account on this instance? I chose it randomly when I signed up and don't know enough about the situation.

Should I be concerned enough to go make another account or is it essentially meaningless at the end of the day?

You may lose out on some content as instances have defederated from it. Although most of the hardcore tankies moved to lemmygrad.ml, leaving lemmy.ml as the clean PRC PR face so it'll probably not see as much defederation.
I think most of us are very new to this, we are learning about instances, server, communities, federation etc and how are they different, as reddit user it will take us time to grasp the general idea. But one thing great about lemmy is the freedom to choose instance , so if you don't like something hop to another instance where it resonates with your like, take a look at community which you follow and instance associated with it.
I feel these few months most of the user will be instance hopping 🤣, and slowly as time goes most of us will settle down to our new home. And I am sure you will find your answer too by then.
I guess follow your beliefs on this one. Also, it's possible that by you being there, you add to the number of active users on that instance, therefore increasing the appeal for newer users to join in and possibly donate to the founders. (which are tankies)

Kind of new to this. I thought threads didn't yet implement activitypub and therefore couldn't federate with other apps. So how did lemmy defederate from meta? Or is that just a promise to never federate with meta?

Yeah it's kind of a pre-emptive thing, so when (if) Threads does turn on federation, they're already blocked.

it's kinda funny to see in real time.

Certainly not “ha-ha” funny