Please understand that plenty of us do not judge people based on instance at all. I genuinely don’t care.

there’s always going to be this stigma against .ml users due to how the .ml instance was formed and how the general userbase behaves.

the good news is that you are always free to switch instances if you find out that you dislike the instance you are currently on. while your posts, comments, and “karma” won’t transfer, you can transfer everything else such as the communities you follow, your settings, and your blocklist.

FWIW, I left .ml after about a year (and around a month ago) because there were just enough threads shit flinging and just enough posts like below, and just enough people who would dismiss any argument based on seeing .ml that it annoyed the shit out of me.

Not for how anyone at .ml ever treated me. (And FTR I’m not a communist)

So I’d say how much you worry about it is up to you, but switching instances is also pretty easy.

didn’t you know that signing up for an instance is actually evidence of thoughtcrime?

Just drop them like it’s hot, lose nothing of value. There is probably an instance local to your nation or you can use .world which is a generic nonspecific Lemmy except they defederate from Hexbear and Lemmygrad because those instances spam so much bot content trying to convince users to off their families and neighbors.

Most of us don’t judge users but we are internally vocal about our own social challenges.

.ml is a big instances and people coming from the old web find such attractive, it feels like “the official one” we are well aware.

The have been attempts to advertise avoiding those but were not exactly a well coordinated organization.

Regardless the ideology of .ml and others big instances pose a problem in centralized power. Lemmy works best as many tiny servers organically building a network of content and ideas.

All of Lemmy is accessible as long as your instance is federated (almost all) however some may defederate from those problematic big ones, limiting the posts you can see.

You wont lose much by changing instance right now. There is no karma or rewards associated with your account. You can also make multiple on different instances with the same user name so you have a backup if your main instance goes down.

Don’t worry much about your instance. .ml is fine, but Lemmygrad.ml in particular is a very strange place. Have a look if you want to read what non-religious people hostile to the United States/West think. Sometimes they make good points but they’re such fundamentalist assholes about everything.

Just remember that a lot of people on here also used to be the most annoying redditors. Their opinions are worthless.

You’re not expected to know.

Just sign up somewhere else.

All accounts are throw away.

You can always move to another instance. The instance I joined first is very lovely but they’re a bit heavy on defederation, so half of the comments are unavailable. It’s actually very nice, but fomo is too strong with me. When I feel depressed by humanity, I switch back to that one again and feel better, not seeing all the bullshit.

It takes nothing to create a new Lemmy account. And there are tons of instances that don’t have authoritarian admins.

The core community is mainly holier-than-thou FOSS types, and you’re surprised that it’s insular?

deleted by creator

Same

Account hopping costs nothing (it’s not like Lemmy has “karma”)

I made my first account on dotworld, but then dotworld started doing defederations I didn’t like. Now I’m in a furry-centric instance. :P

I’m on ML because it is the dev’s instance, that’s it. Also, I dislike how .world is run.

Yeah, and them being trigger-happy with the ban hammer is why Lemmy exists at all today. All Reddit alternatives back then were Nazi hotpots, because pretty much only folks who got banned from Reddit joined the alternatives (and back then, Reddit moderation primarily concerned itself with Nazis).

They would show up on dev.lemmy.ml, too, and “just ask questions”, like if an immigrant did a certain crime, would you want them deported?
These questions served no point other than to drive the conversation tone to the right.
And yeah, I was glad that the admins were always vigilant about that and immediately banned anyone asking such ‘questions’, even if it may have thrown legitimately curious folks under the bus, because it allowed proper conversations to exist.

Of course, I have survivorship bias. I don’t concern myself with China or Russia nearly enough to have specific opinions about them.
But when someone is not being intentionally intolerant, I am of the opinion that talking to them is worth it and the only way to help center opinions which one might perceive as extreme.
But well, I also don’t concern myself with my admins nearly enough to have specific opinions about their opinions either. I don’t have to agree with everything they think, just because I’m on their instance, so I don’t care nearly as much as some other folks here.

Also a lot of people just join a random popular instance at the start before looking into political shit like this, and they don’t want to switch later on.

At this point I’m not sure if they are tankies, or whether they’ve just been called tankies by people who call all leftists tankies.

My words. We arent done justice

I cannot support an instance where criticism of countries like North Korea or Venezuela is sanctioned with 30 day bans, even defending the Russian invasion of Ukraine is tolerated. I love open source software and it breaks my heart, but I completely blocked .ml after multiple incidents I witnessed or was part of in the news and worldnews communities.

Also I cannot really understand the argument of having an “old account”. All it means on Lemmy is having a year and a month in your profile. It is even a good idea to switch your account from time to time to stay more anonymous.

Tankies aren’t real leftists. They’re morons who honor authority over freedom to the point they’ll suck off authoritarians from history. Basically (very, very basically), they’re the authoritarian “left”… as much as anyone who is rightly left honors undue authority…

I am confused now. I was just called a “leftist Nazi” and “liberal right wing nazi”. Lulz.

My point is that I think the terms “leftist” and “liberal” have been redefined again, just as a heads up.

The lemmy.ml (.ml is for Mali, btw) domain was chosen because ML can also stand for Marxist-Leninist.

Do you have the developers actually claiming this, or only second hand information? I was under the impression that they chose .ml because they were handing those domains out for free.

All three are very reasonable and fun if you go in actually willing to chat.

I don’t know what I expected but it wasn’t this. I had no idea.

New users, I recommend blocking this account in particular. This person is completely off the rails, and spends their time on Lemmy pushing debunked western propaganda.

More completely made up anti-commie shit. It is not popular in any of those instances to think that Russia isn’t a fascist fuckup of a government.

^ This is the most accurate explanation. I was on .ml for quite a while before I realized the pattern that any time I criticized Russian attacks or war crimes, I got downvoted and brigaded. Any time I promoted Ukraines right to defend itself I got downvoted and brigaded. Often my posts were removed. Try to mention tienamen square there ;-). They will come troll threads on other instances from time to time too. I just block them these days and refuse to subscribe to any .ml communities.

There are fully factual bases for denying nearly every western smear. That people are invested in hatred formed by US/western propaganda, means all facts and reality are “tankie propaganda”.

The main problem is that any criticism of China is met with an instant ban, as per “Rule 1, 2”.

Oof. That is a lot to take in. Thank you for this; it all makes sense now.