Yep. Even if it's larger, I'll post in a smaller, non-ml. I don't mind reading their stuff and them existing but with the seemingly random moderation shenanigans, I avoid it.

I see more content complaining about .ml than I see content on .ml worth complaining about.

I generally don't block instances, communities, or users, either. I just know I am capable of recognizing a shit take on politics anywhere and can move on without existential or social crisis.

Previously no. Now yes. Apparently got banned for inciting 'peril' against my own race because tankies don't know the difference between ethnically Chinese and of Chinese nationality, and apparently you can't criticize china in the forums. Throw in a few abusive individuals from the same instance shooting off the mouth and I pretty much said fuck it, I'm out.

What’s wrong with lemmy.ml?

lemmy.ml tends to have an immature userbase with immature mods. It's a weird bubble of insane extremists that are all about ideological purity tests. They aren't really interested in discussion and will ban anyone that doesn't conform to their extremism. And their extremists are constantly edging towards stochastic terrorism.

So needless to say, I'm banned from lemmy.ml, and I feel like that's a badge of honour. But that does mean I won't be engaging with any community that's hosted on lemmy.ml.

So if you want to have discussion that's not about how super awesome the violent overthrow of the government of your country would be, I'd recommend not hosting your community on lemmy.ml.

I never pay attention to, or care about where a community is hosted

I block politics subs and have never had an issue with lemmy.ml. All the issues I see are related to politics.

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.

No, there are no instances whose communities I refuse to participate on. I have never blocked a community, user, or instance here.

This is something that that bothers me..... I joined lemmy.ml around 3 years ago as one of the pirate subs on reddit made a backup community there in case they were banned.

Fast forward to the api debacle, I started to use lemmy as a permanent alternative, and made 3 of my favourite art communities- abstract photography, collage and printmaking

It's always been in the back (and sometimes the front of my mind) whether to move them elsewhere, partly because people commenting on their 'blanket ban' of lemmy.ml, and the fact that I sometimes feel that I'm on one of the 'pariah' instances.

It's interesting reading the comments here, especially considering the art communities are laid back, without politics, and haven't had any issues (so far).....

Yes. I find their gaming-chair leftism and obnoxious preachiness annoying enough to just avoid. My blocklist is filled with .ml users, and none of those were because of any political positions. It's because they were annoying, whinging twats.

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.

Nope. I participate everywhere in the lemmy fediverse I can and never really had any issues with mods yet, which is surprising as I don't hesitate to get into political arguments generally. Ive blocked users, but never an instance. I take everything on a community by community and user by user basis.

No, because its nonsense tribalism. I haven't seen any actual consistency in nonsense takes between any particular instances, with only a couple of extreme examples (explodingheads, grad, yddrasil, etc) that are already blocked or dehosted. ML has more socialists, because lemmy was a little leftist community project at first and it's one of the oldest and biggest instances. Big instances also have a lot of idiots. World has a reputation for a lot of idiots, because it's by far the biggest instance. That doesn't mean everyone, or even most people, are idiots that are on the instance.

I generally don’t worry about communities. Either the community is well run or not.

Users, though. I’ll block trolls all day long. If I notice I’m blocking a whole bunch of users from the same instance, I’ll block the instance. So far that has only happened twice. Lemmygrad and feddit.ro.

Absolutely.

I watch closely though.

Edit: Judging by my history, I missed it a couple times and participated

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.

Yes, but not really deliberately. I catch the instance ban hammer from their fragile admins so often I never get established in any of their comms

I've blocked the instance quite a while ago. In the beginning I was just blocking communities, but the users spill everywhere unless you go nuclear.

100% yes.
.ml generates most of the propaganda about my country I was complaining about in other post.
Just the fact that their admins also own grad speaks volumes.
It gets tiring having to be on the tolerant side while they can freely astrosurf backed and protected by their admins and devs... Just like the bots on reddit.

If only blocking the instance at user level also blocked the users it would be great.

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.

I've declined the opportunity to Mod a community on lemmy.ml, which is really not like me.

I prefer to support smaller instances, but don't have a problem with lemmy.ml specifically (whereas I do sometimes go out of my way to avoid lemmy.world)

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

Certainly. I have the entire instance blocked as their moderation, admins, and plenty of the users I've interacted with are unpleasant. It's no Hexbear or Grad, but it's enough that my experience is better without their communities.