Just blocked lemmy.ml from my Lemmy account, and I swear to god it's one of the best things I've ever done on this platform. My homepage feels actually clean now.

For the past few months I'd been seeing a lot of tankie posting and pretty much far-left propaganda on my feed. It got tiring enough that I finally checked my blocked-user list, and realized pretty much everyone I'd blocked was from lemmy.ml. So I just blocked the whole instance instead.

Saying this as someone who considers themselves a leftist: I used to think Lemmy itself was an echo chamber. Turns out lemmy.ml was the problem the entire time. Probably the reason I tolerated it for so long is that I agreed with a lot of what they posted, but like an oversaturated meme, I'd had enough. Browsing the platform was starting to feel way too tiring instead of fun, which defeats the point of being here in the first place.

The breaking point was seeing some dude post a "meme" implying North Korea and China are basically communist utopias and that the West sucks. I mean, the West does suck, but come on - you're saying North Korea is the ideal the West should strive for? What the hell...

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[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 6 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Dunno if that's "on purpose". I think it's more, back in the day .ml was the defacto standard instance, so lots of average people went there and you'd find a wider bandwidth of people. That might have changed with some people leaving and the new visitors not signing up on .ml anymore. That makes the rest of the group condense to people who pick .ml on purpose. But that's not a deliberate plan, more how maths works. 😅

[–] JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works 2 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

It's the same everywhere in the Fediverse, and it always has:

Newbies always join the biggest server. Unless, of course, the biggest server is being hidden by most of the other servers (pawoo.net used to be the biggest of all Fediverse servers until newbie zerg rushes onto mastodon.social demoted it).

It's a no-brainer. Don't know where to go? Just go where everyone goes. Don't know what to do? Just do what everyone does. Also explains the success of the iPhone, the Samsung Galaxy S, the Ford F-150, the VW Golf, the Toyota Corolla...

Back in the day, when Reddit charged app devs $20M for their API, which killed 3rd-party apps, which enshittified Reddit, which caused the first migration wave to Lemmy, Lemmy still was so small that lemmy.ml was the biggest server, being run by Lemmy itself and all. So naturally, everyone went to lemmy.ml.

Eventually, in spite of people from all walks of life and with all kinds of attitude being there, lemmy.ml had become so unabashedly Tankie that countless users decided to move elsewhere. It had become blatantly clear that .ml, actually the TLD of Mali, stands for МДЯ☭ЇꙄМ-LЭИЇИЇꙄМ. Back then, lemmy.world was the largest non-Tankie server, so they went there.

It was due to that migration within Lemmy that lemmy.world outgrew lemmy.ml and became the biggest Lemmy server. Being #1 on the list of the biggest Lemmy servers, it also became the #1 destination for newbies, and the feedback loop started anew.

A side-effect was that the Tankie-to-non-Tankie rate on lemmy.ml grew because it was almost exclusively non-Tankies who left whereas the Tankies stayed.

[–] alsimoneau@lemmy.ca 0 points 7 hours ago

Hey! My Golf was amazing! I wish they still made cars like it.