Asking as there has been a few comments mentioning this with the new [email protected] taking over [email protected]
[email protected] for additional context on those recent events if you are interested
Also, an older post for more context on how lemmy.ml is managed: https://lemmy.world/post/16211417
Curious to hear other thoughts about this, as I’m trying to keep [email protected] active, but might suggest to move it elsewhere if a lot of people prefer not to interact with lemmy.ml communities
As someone on .ml I really don’t think it’s that bad. Definitely left, and generally pro-China, but not too extreme imo. Hexbear is pretty bad. I’m a socialist and I disagree with a lot of the stuff there. But .ml is very much not a true “tankie” instance, in my opinion.
A lot of the issues people have with .ml are the practices of the admins.
Though also when hexbear.net was defederated from so many instances, a lot of those users switched to using their Lemmy.ml alts - many are quite open about this fact - and just continued posting as they had done previously, despite that style being the very reason why hexbear.net had been defederated from.
And when more instances - like lemmy.cafe - start defederating from Lemmy.ml, then those users will surely switch to alts on something like lemmy.world or Lemm.ee that are generally considered too large to be defederated from.
A lot of innocent users get caught up in the cross hairs of this fight between tankies vs. anti-tankies. People using your instance as a platform to attack (e.g. brigade and otherwise spew forth toxicity) other instances, yet possibly behaving normally else wise inside the instance itself.
Also, whether something is “extreme” or not depends on someone’s background context, and I would definitely say that the content on lemmy.ml is considered somewhat extreme for someone on America. Even/especially those who even consider themselves as “liberal”, not realizing yet what little that means on the international stage. The content is nowhere close to being as extreme as that from lemmygrad.ml or hexbear.net, but far more so than e.g. Reddit or Mastodon.
So I hope I have adequately conveyed that it’s not your fault in any way, you also expanding to mean all the other innocent users on lemmy.ml, but I wanted to convey that yes, I would defederate myself from your instance in a heartbeat if given half the chance. Possibly you won’t even mind:-), but you seemed interested, so I hope I helped by writing all this out.
Weirdly, I find a lot of the content on America-centric sources (not just in Lemmy) to be pretty damned extreme myself. Like the casual assumption that guns are the right way to deal with all problems. (Slightly exaggerated, yes, but sadly only slightly.)
Oh yeah, and it makes total sense. The brigading, insofar as it happens, really shouldn’t. But also, as someone who espouses left wing views, I always want to give critical support to left spaces - even if they’re imperfect. And .ml and even hexbear have a lot of valuable discourse - I comment on hexbear threads regularly with less radical points of view than their users often have, and I get good responses and engagement usually because I’m good faith.