Lemmy’s core developers are Tankies (radical supporters of the CCP and anyone else claiming to carry on second world ideology, such as Putin) as are many of those running older instances. This includes older instances such as Lemmygrad and lemmy.ml, which makes them very entrenched. Still, they seem to be a very vocal minority, since larger instances like Lemmy.world lean away from that, and PieFed (an alternative but still intercompatible Lemmy alternative) is popular in part from those wishing to move away from Lemmy’s tankie developers.