I think Lemmy has a lot of Far Left people on the site. In this instance, I'm referring to people who are staunchly against capitalism and often in favor of communism, even if they don't support CCP or Russia. I've also noted a higher-than-normal instances of anarchists here.

As for specifically pro-China shills, I've only seen one, but they were very active in c/worldnews.

If Lemmy grows in popularity, I expect we'll see the community shift more towards center, for better and/or worse.

I think part of it is because lemmy has historically been welcoming to people with different ideas. If your views aren't welcome elsewhere, you can just host your own instance and say whatever you want.

But I also think we're witnessing coordinated propaganda. It reminds me so much of the pro-russian trolling and memes that took over 4chan in 00s and early 10s.

Just unsub from lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml communities. You might still see them in All if your instance federated with them.

There's some overlap between open source enthusiasts and anarchists/communists. It comes with the territory. Most of them are not tankies, but rather are anti-patent or anti-IP or similar, but there's definitely a few on the fringe. And open source folks are among the earliest adopters of federated networks so a left slant is expected, to a limited extent.

So far I like it here. I'm a centrist (by Canadian standards). Ive seen a few extremists leaning tankie if alt-right in various threads, but that's okay. The centre seems to be holding and voting them down.

I've mainly just seen in on the lemmygrad instance when I go to all. I find the content over there to be a bit silly (even as a socialist). I think you can block instances? I've blocked some of the more trolling/low effort communities.

But I also see it in the other direction. I've seen people ask open ended questions about the USSR and CCP for something they may have done well and people will downvote and "what-about-ism" for other stuff that isn't/wasn't so good, but is also off topic for what was asked.

There's not a lot of effective discourse around the topic, I think. The conversation seems to be either entirely positive or negative for everything about them, even when the post is about one thing in particular. We can't really say, "This thing was done well" without the what-about-isms, nor can we say "This other thing was not done well" without it applying to everything.

But to come back to your question, as you worded it "support for...", that seems to be in line with the conversations here. It's either "support" or "against" and not a whole lot of analysis. As in, if you say something positive then you support everything. Obviously, that shouldn't be the case, but that does seem to be the narrative here.

that post has the most comment's i've ever seen so far. at least that i can remember. or maybe i just live a sheltered lemmy life, haha.