You weren’t around for it, but it was bad – you couldn’t avoid them and user level instance blocking wasn’t a thing yet. Blocking users didn’t work because they were constantly making alts, including on other instances.

Calls were made for instances hosting them to ban those users: most did, some refused to or couldn’t. Multiple instances were mass defederated from but lemmygrad and hexbear were the big two.

Instances defederated from hexbear and lemmygrad because a few dozen users from those instances were terminally online trolls. They’d relentlessly harass users they didn’t like (i.e. most people), spam threads with gross images, and were generally obnoxious shitheads.

Also, “Tankie” is an insult against the hardcore authoritarian left: people that cheer on repressive dictators and violent supression of dissent. The term was invented by communists out of disgust for some of their “fellows”.

Of course, if you ask a tankie they’ll try to argue the word is an insult to all communists/socialists/leftists … it’s not.

Has sanitation, pest control, and medicine have advanced since the 13th century?

No … we still need cats to do all the heavy lifting.