It seems like most have this covered, but it is my limited understanding that which instance you pick can defederate from others of their own choosing. This means you can't see their content AFAIK.

Censorship still exists in lemmy. I got banned from an instance just because I said some things that weren't aligning with far left ideas. I was one of the active members of that instance (we were very few) on non political communities.

I made a political post and one of the administrators wasn't OK with it and started insulting me and then banned me from the whole instance.

lemmy.ml has earned itself a pretty bad reputation, although there are instances that are worse. They keep things clean enough to not get defederated, but you're not really in sane company on there.

It's normal and actually kind of cool by design - the 'fediverse' is basically a bunch of different servers (instances) that can all connect to each other. I'm on Lemmy.world, my other account is on midwest.social, but when I'm looking at posts from all communities on either of those I see more or less the same stuff from all the other communities across the other instances.

But some instances have a theme, like Midwest.social is kind of intended for people from the midwest, but anyone can join. Lemmy.ml is kind of a communist hangout. Solarpunk(spelling) is a lot more eco-conscious than other instances.

You can join any instance you want, sometimes after you join an instance you notice a theme that doesn't really vibe with you, but you can join a more 'vanilla' instance, stay on your current instance, or look around for some instance that's really into whatever you're into.

But at the end of the day your credentials on an instance are basically a passport for all the other instances, and it's mostly gonna be a legit good passport.

That said, if an instance goes to crap from bad moderation or from horrible viewpoints or culture, other instances can basically block it, and if you're on an instance that becomes defederated your basically cut off from all the other instances, so you better go find a better instance, but that doesn't happen all too often

The level of censorship is going to be different depending on your instance and where you are posting to. A lot of instances are managed by individuals or small teams out of passion. They can do as they please and don't have to pander to everyone for commercial appeal like Reddit or Tumblr. If someone doesn't like what they're doing they can join a different instance or create their own.

Instances can defederate from each other over these differences. A lot are defederated from the instance Exploding Heads because of their alt right content for example. From what I understand you can also report content to the administrators of your instance if it goes against their rules and I think they can remove it from appearing on your instance (or block the user that posted it). This isn't going to stop it from appearing elsewhere.

Think of Lemmy instances like a Discord server. You are joining a community. You are not joining up to a centralized corporate website. There are many lemmy instances. Shop around. lemmy.ml are Marxist-Leninist. It's what the .ml stands for. If that's not for you, find another instance.

That's an interesting description of lemmy.ml

I'll just say that hiding not only the instance, but also any comments from any user registered with that instance has made my Lemmy experience about 1000 times better.

Edit: oh shit I'm thinking lemmyGRAD.ml lol

Hmmm, it seems that trolls have invaded AskLemmy.