Lemmy.ml is a complicated story. The admins include some of the chief developers of the Lemmy software, and so e.g. !Fediverse!fediverse@lemmy.ml is there, as is c/firefox with ~4.2k monthly users, whereas in comparison firefox at lemmy.world has about a tenth of that.

The admins are known to kick people from the entire instance, for e.g. claiming that the Tiananmen Square massacre did happen (you read that right - did, not "did not", but did). So it is extremely totalitarian behavior, with a set of "alternate facts" that they echo around amongst one another, with little to no quarter offered to those who believe in "facts" that the leaders have not approved. Some people avoid the instance altogether purely for this reason, which seems similar to me to the reason(s) that many of us left Reddit in the first place - e.g. in solidarity against Huffman and what he did & said to app developers, and the whole "landed gentry" and such.

But more important is their complement of users. Some of them are great people to talk to - others not so much. On the whole, for someone on an instance that has already blocked lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net, blocking lemmy.ml can remove >90% of all the spammy comments that one tends to receive on the Fediverse. I am saying that well over 90% of the time when someone gives me the most batshit INSANE reply that left my mouth dropping open for just how stupid it was... I looked and found that it was someone from the lemmy.ml instance. I think being used to batting those "alternative facts" around back-and-forth, they are very much aware that use of power, which for a normal user (not a mod or admin) mostly means taking a stance of hostility, often "wins" arguments - from their POV anyway, e.g. when the recipient stops responding - more so than actual logical argumentation. And they are correct, in the sense that the only way for evil to flourish is for good people to do nothing to stop them, so by cowing people into submission they seem to want to manage to assert their will upon everyone around them (which I am calling "stupidity" b/c it presumes that I am somehow not aware of a third choice - not to merely agree or disagree with them, either of which I am expected to express via a reply to their comment, but to bow out from the conversation entirely).

Again, not everyone from those instances is that way, just... that it is a trend (a fairly major one). I should mention that some of that is likely due to the fact that it is a large server, like lemmy.world. In fact, I argued with people against blocking it for many months, but finally relented, and now I truly enjoy the peace that has come from it. Now, the language that I would use is that if someone were to do such, it would cost them something - some potentially good interactions, and some communities are located there - but on the whole it may be worth the cost, depending on what the user is looking for. It is like walking through an open sewer - maybe you want to do it occasionally, to keep tabs on what is there? But it sure is nice to walk away from that sometimes too:-).

I don't know so much about the other "communities" on blahaj. I'm just saying that Ada seems very reasonable, and I've never felt unwelcomed there anytime I've spoken in a thread. Perhaps it was merely an overzealous mod of that specific community, power-tripping or just flat tired of their responsibility and not living up to whatever "should" have been done in that case - which since your participation in any of the other communities on that instance were not affected, seems certain to be the case. Tbf, moderation across the entire Fediverse is extremely spotty - and due to the lower volume of posts, mods often do so for multiple communities, which can then strain their resources to keep up. Just block that community, when / if ever your ban expires, and move on and enjoy the rest of what the Fediverse has to offer!:-)

Btw, if you’re blocking all Hexbear stuff, how did you find my comment? It’s a response to a Hexbear user. So you see their comment as well?

That is an excellent question - and you said you wanted to learn how this all works, so here goes. When one instance "defederates" another instance, it removes the entirety of all communication with them - e.g. no communities, no users, no posts, no comments/replies/notifications, no up/down-votes, nothing. And I think when a user blocks someone... here I am not fully certain, but I think it's a lot like that - e.g. I think the blocked person cannot downvote you anymore. And their comment replies are collapsed, or simply not present (you can always view them as read-only by visiting another instance where you are logged out, usually opening the multi-colored fediverse icon in a new tab will do so). However, when a user "blocks" an instance, it is the weakest of any of these. Yes I can still see their comment, I can upvote it (I rarely ever downvote anything at all - certainly less than once per day and most often less than once per week), and I can reply. Also, it prevents any communities from that instance from showing up in my "All" feed. They can still up/downvote me though, and vice versa. The main difference is that if a user from that instance replies back to me, I will not receive a "notification" about that event (UNLESS they specifically tag me by name). This is a form of protection against the sort of "brigading" that they are known to enjoy - especially in a community such as ChapoTrapHouse where that is literally the goal of it existing (it literally says so, right in the sidebar, though for a new user who merely sees a post pop up in their feed, they would not know that - and that btw is my major beef with it, not that I wish that it did not exist, but that it would be labelled properly, especially relevant to new users who the stories abound where they/we stumbled into them unawares, and if we managed to not leave the entire Fediverse afterwards, we at least do not recall the hazing experience fondly).

I can, however, come back to this thread later and peruse it, see their reply, and reply back to them. I have done such many times. It is an impediment but not a full blocker to a conversation, for people from instances that I have user-blocked, but that our instance has not fully defederated from. I often engage in conversations with users of hexbear.net and/or lemmy.ml - they are not all toxic assholes (nor am I never one myself I would wager:-) - it is just that on balance, I find that the benefits of user-blocking that instance strongly outweigh the detractions. Which ofc would be a different equation for you, as you have a different purpose in mind, especially for this as an alt account from your lemmy.world one, but anyway I hope this insight into how defederation and user blocking works helps further your understanding of the Fediverse:-).