I have to say the responses in this thread are a bummer, but I’m not surprised. I signed up on lemmy.ml because when I read the descriptions of the various instances, ML’s “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts” sounded pretty great and I saw a lot of technical communities that interested me. I didn’t expect the politics. I tried to make a new user on .world a few months back, but I seemed to get stuck in some sort of user verification limbo. Maybe I’ll try midwest.social since I moved to the midwest recently.

Depends on the community and what has been posted. If it’s something simple like AskLemmy and people aren’t being super weird or preachy about communism or whatever, I don’t find harm. I personally don’t think I’ve had any bad experiences with them outside of the time I said I didn’t trust a certain news outlet, which I cannot remember the name of.

If the conversation is civil I’ll comment occasionally, but i don’t think I’d care if my instance defederated from them. They’re where a lot of tech related conversations are, sadly.

I think it’s generally best to host communities on politically neutral instances

Yes, I block lemmy.ml communities when I notice them, just because I don’t want to accidentally contribute anything to that instance. Some of the users are okay, but the admins are not.

While I have not blocked the instance (yet), I purposely try not to post anything on any community hosted there and rather look for alternatives. Sometimes it’s easier to comment and or post on an ml instance due to it being larger in user size such as the !privacy@lemmy.ml vs !privacy@lemmy.world.

Nah, IDGAF about it one way or another. You run into more jerks there than average, but that’s about it, so as long as block lists function, it’s all good

If there’s an overlapping or related community on another instance, I’ll avoid using the .ml version of that community

Of course.

They banned me for calling Russia imperialist in one of their rant post, and claiming NATO was necessary because countries keep invading their neighbors.

Ah, the daily whinge-fest on Lemmy.world. In my 3 decades using the internet, I have never found online communities that are so consistently in opposition to US propaganda as the .ml’s and hexbear. .World is so militantly US-liberal it puts reddit to shame. You can find such opinions all over the internet, but real left wing politics are much rarer since you basically have to self-host them, unlike the corporate friendly liberal and fascist politics.

I’ve blocked the instance entirely. I never see posts from their communities, though I am surprised to still see users from it. I thought it would block everything.

No. I self-censor a bit there, and prefer other instances so I don’t have to, though.

No. People complaining about ml are exaggerating.

Well, I’m here and I don’t know what you all are talking about. And this is sincere, truly don’t understand what’s the issue, could you point me to some of these controversial situations/discussions/measures?

I have a feeling that, if you ask for any specific instance, you’ll get people complaining and blocking that instance for their own reasons. So, I’d let my users decide whether they block or not a user or a whole instance. For example, I don’t like some of the communities in lemmy.world and I complain about it because it just feels the same as being in reddit, but having access to a different point of view is very valuable to me, so I don’t block them.

I also have to add that I use lemmy with the voting system completely disabled. I hate the voting system because it shapes people’s opinions to fit in some specific communities. This is why I think blocking instances should only be used as a last resort against things like blatant spam, boycotting, CP, hate speech and the likes.