Other users have linked to good resources, but one thing I'd like to comment on is that people should be wary of overusing thought-terminating epithets. Communists also have this problem to some extent when they flippantly throw out the "fascist" label, but coming into the wider fediverse after the redditpocalypse, I've seen too many "discussions" that are essentially "authoritarian totalitarian fascist genocidal dictatorship upvotes to the left pls" which is an extremely reddit type of discourse that serves to shut down discussion before it even begins (they're bad bad bad bad nothing to talk about).
I'm not accusing you of this because you've made a good faith effort to seek out constructive engagement. In most other cases though, I wish more people would investigate these claims like how you're doing instead of salad tossing adjectives and relying purely on intuition and cultural conditioning.
I wouldn't be surprised if you start to get bad faith actors signing up to your instance to intentionally wreck your reputation.