First off, going to apologize because I'm trying to explain things with the most minimal bias I can muster.

To explain as easily as I can, there's a wide variety of attitudes on Lemmy. .ml is notorious for being pro-Russia and China, banning anyone who speaks out against them. They've also been held as the largest, most active instance, so they've heavily gotten away with how users are treated for voicing differing opinions. You can also find mass downvotes against people who speak out against .ml, even outside of the instance, with members flooding in to defend them.

They're part of what people on here call the "Tankie Triad", using communist rhetoric as their defense for what many outside of the group think is absolutely abhorrent behavior.

There's a lot more complexity going on, especially with the main Lemmy devs openly holding the same viewpoints, but that's a very surface level overlook.

Welcome! So Tankies are what are known as authoritarian "communists". They often praise authoritarian regimes so long as they're against the West and claim to be communistic or similar. Such as China and Russia and also deny any wrong doings of them. Like, they'll deny the events of tiananmen square, that people in China are heavily censored, that Russia was wholly justified in invading Ukraine or even that NK isn't run by a Dictatorship.

They also often claim that they're "the only true leftists", even among actual communists/socialists that don't praise authoritarian regimes that only vaugly claim to be communistic lol

.ml is one of the original Lemmy instances by the Lemmy devs who are hardcore tankies and they'll enforce (though they'll never admit it) their ideology throughout the instance by removing content that is against Russia/China/NK and claim it's "bigotry" or something. They're part of the Tankie Triad, the other 2 instances are Hexbear and Lemmygrad.

But those 2 are so in your face about it that most instances, including yours, defederate from them (When an instances admin decides to refuse to accept another instances content/posts/voting/users) But .ml opts to do it subtlety through moderator action and because they have a number of official support comms, other Instances are hesitant to defederate from them

You're on !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works a comm mostly for the collection and documentation of their words and actions

PD is perfect for this IMO. Love that instance.

I think !privacy@lemmy.dbzer0.com is doing very well (federated with hexbear, but they behave more), its possible to move off ML, it just takes effort :) hopefully it will overtake !privacy@lemmy.ml in the future.

Yea .ml Linux subscriber count is unrealistic at 52k (for now), but it looks like on MAUs !linux@programming.dev seems like the best bet to take the crown

We should move everyone to the PD comm. Moving everyone to .world will result in some headaches.

Probably because you need an account on the instance you want to make a comm for, though you should make an account on the target instance just for that and then add your main account as a mod to the new comm, many don't

When the initial surge of users came, they went to .world because it was the only instance that kept up with the demand. I encourage people making comms to make them on other instances.

Because centralization actually works.

They have since reverted the block, but I got a hefty selection of communities spread across multiple servers. I followed [!linuxgaming@level-up.zone](/c/linuxgaming@level-up.zone), as well as [!linux4noobs@programming.dev](/c/linux4noobs@programming.dev) for example - as they are on more dedicated servers, rather than general purpose ones. Sadly, the former did not take off the way I expected it to 😁

Yea that's how it should be realistically, and there is ongoing work to try to distribute .world and other very large instances content more evenly.

Lemmy.ml just gets more attention and actual calls for boycotting/defederation and such because of their... despicable... actions

Also, when did friendica start federating with the Lemmy-verse I could have sworn it wasn't active lolol