They are easily riled and while I doubt there is intentional coordination in place, due to their fervour, they can come across like a brigade. If you speak up against them - cue the hexbears flocking to this comment no doubt - they can get quite vicious, as my comment history will witness.
Hexbear's been isolated for a while, and their site developed a culture of trashing on people who "debate" in bad faith, as well as some other stuff like PPB which is weird especially for outsiders.
If you're browsing internal Hexbear posts, you'll find lots of posts under irony which make them perhaps difficult to appreciate. I'd recommend visiting Lemmygrad first.
I have been called one just for being critical of the US military, it's a catch all term for anyone that isnt strictly for capitalist imperialism. I consider it a soft resurgence of the red scare, I cringe each time I see it just like when I see the term lib.
Both the pro Russian and the pro america-no-matter-the-cost crowds just stink of stupidity imo
Because tankies are next-level communists. So while all tankies are also commies, not all commies are tankies.
For me the biggest distinction is that I think commies are just naive and want to live in a fairy tale, tankies are actually malicious and want to fuck it up for all of us if we let them.
It's original definition doesn't include liberals. I consider myself relatively left. I've had people ridicule some of my viewpoints for being too liberal (I guess too center for them). Those people were tankies, but they weren't tankies because they're more left than me. It's because they consider themselves to be very left leaning while still praising authoritative regimes and being apologists for them. That's the tank part. They're alright with military dictatorships of the past and even consider them to have been successful. They also rarely are able to admit the flaws of those regimes (including the genocides), and even if they do, there's a "reason" for it (X might have been bad and did this, but at the same time, it also did Y which was somewhat good)
Thanks to open source and federation we can fork and kick them out (and also tell them to kill themselves enough that they either leave or actually do.)
They didn't invent ActivityPub and don't have any role in its development.