Oh no, these guys are really old fashioned Marxist-Leninists and at some point they even admitted to being Stalinists.

They’re not the thinking kind of Lefties who might just be against war out of principle, they’re just heavily indoctrinated types in a very specific prepackaged ideology that claims to be Leftwing - basically they’re "Left"wing MAGAs.

The tankie stereotype is in fact real - rare, but real.

Oh yeah, around here (Portugal) we have a Communist Party and they’re pro-Russia and supported Putin even though present day Russia is actually Fascist and the Portuguese Communist Party was born in the fight against the Fascist Dictatorship that ruled the country until 1974.

Didn’t go down so well and a number of them walked back on it but the official position of the party is still vague and I’ve heard some of them parrot Russian propaganda points once in a while.

Their political beliefs are a collection of really old slogans rather than a thinking ideology so they’re basically brainless muppets and hence their long-running mindless love for Russia was easy to exploit by Putin’s Regime.

Mind you, when the invasion started I also saw some of the old people in the small leftwing party I’m in instinctively side with Russia (leftwingers in Portugal during the Fascist days were heavily inspired by the Soviet Union hence the older one tend to instinctively side with Russia), but at least those I could convince away from that position (by for example pointing out the similarities with America invading Iraq and hence that being against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the only consistent position with being against America’s invasion of Iraq) - those people are in a leftwing party other than in the Communist Party exactly because they’re not into authoritarianism and mindless following of Party dictums so they’re actually thinking lefties rather than merely slogan parrots.

The expression “back to baseline” comes from Science and Engineering and literally means that something has gone back to the previous average flat level (for example: “the power line noise level spiked when your turned the machine on but is now back to baseline”)

Edit: not average, but actually specifically the original flat level below which things would not fall. Sorry, it’s kinda hard to explain in words but very easy to point out in a graph or a scope were it’s just this flat line to which things always return.

That expression makes sense if you’re talking about the rate of growth itself (i.e. the Lemmy rate of growth spiked at the time of the Reddit changes and eventually went back to baseline, since Lemmy is not growing any faster now than before the Reddit changes) but it doesn’t make sense if you’re talking about user numbers since the number of Lemmy users grew a lot with the Reddit changes and never went back to the average before them, not even close.

Your original post is not clear on which of those things you’re talking about when you wrote “back to baseline” and your subsequent posts are mainly talking about user numbers, giving the idea that that’s what your “back to baseline” is refering to, in which case you’re using that expression incorrectly.