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

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'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.

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).....

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.

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.

Curious to hear other thoughts about this, as I'm trying to keep !simracing@lemmy.ml active, but might suggest to move it elsewhere if a lot of people prefer not to interact with lemmy.ml communities

I would vote for moving it elsewhere. Maybe lemmy.zip would be a good instance that's focused around tech and gaming. Or discuss.tchncs.de because !trucksim@discuss.tchncs.de and !diysimulators@discuss.tchncs.de are already hosted there.

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.

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.

i tend to not even notice, usually picking a community by volume of subs and posting. its hard to keep up with the terrible modding in places as ive subbed to over 800 active communities in various instances. i dont block instances. at minimum, i want to see whats going on.

i dont recall specific issues with .ml but .world seems specifically egregious with its power trip modding, based on how ive been 'reprimanded'.. its amazing how they want to kill activity/enthusiasm in some subs that are desperate for content.

it feels like once an instance gets a solid level of user account churn, they feel they can do whatever to end users as there will just be more. its reddit all over again in places.

the power modding is somewhat shocking to me as the threadiverse really isnt all that large. i guess it doesnt take much for those people.

some of the only users ive silenced are mods

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

Completely banned, I have zero interaction with them.

No. I have blocked a few specific lemmy.ml communities but I don't generally avoid interacting with lemmy.ml.

There are other instances I have blocked completely (a certain grad).

Yes. I've had personal experience, many times, of over the top censorship and bans based on opposing views expressed in a mature and rational way. Once or twice is fine, but I've seen it more there than my entire combined experience online, it's crazy and happens to often to ignore.

I've also seen a crazy amount of trolling there and it seems the trolls are protected through crazy censorship of anyone calling them out. It's just not worth the aggravation.

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.

Instance blocked it. The mods are corrupt and actively shape conversation to align with their world view, without transparency.

It's fine to disagree, and want respectful discourse, but it isn't ok to use very vague sidebar rules to scour dissent

Yes!

That instance just has a stink on it.

I'm sure there's some normal users or communities bit there's a lot who are just plain unpleasant to interact with.

Yes.

Lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net definitely.

Lemmy.ml has some less-bonkers communities, but !worldnews@lemmy.ml generates some of the most complaints, and I'm willing to paint with a broad brush on this one. There's only one community that I can think of that I regret not using and doesn't presently have a non-lemmy.ml alternative, and that's !mechanicalkeyboards@lemmy.ml, and !ergomechkeyboards@lemmy.world has overlap. Also, aside from issues with instance policy, I think that lemmy.ml in particular is not a great instance for major communities, because it's the "dev" instance and Lemmy has had some serious periods of problems where stuff slipped through testing and led to major problems in new releases. Lemmy.world did not hit this, because the admins there are more-conservative about updating, held off until they were sure that new releases were solid. My own home instance at lemmy.today crashed into repeated serious problems with new releases, and the admin decided that in the future, he would also be more conservative about updates.

I also think that it's broader than disagreeing with someone. I'm not a furry or trans, for example, but I've no problem with pawb.social or lemmy.blahaj.zone and have never seen any complaints about moderation on those special-interest instances. However, there's an entire community, !MeanwhileOnGrad@sh.itjust.works, that highlights a lot of moderation and infighting stuff that often I'd call pretty unreasonable off in .ml land. Beehaw.org is pretty left-wing, but they're pretty mellow and don't have the same issues (though they themselves have defederated with a number of major lemmy instances, including, most notably, lemmy.world).

That being said, a number of major lemmy instances have defederated with lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net, and I chose my home instance of lemmy.today specifically because it did not defederate with instances. I want to personally make the call on instance content and on users on an instance. I've only ever blocked one user, and they were just relentlessly spamming images in communities, and I've never blocked an instance. I normally just view communities by subscribed, look at a "whitelist" of communities, not "all" plus a blacklist, though.

EDIT: Oh, and !kagi@lemmy.ml doesn't presently have an alternative, and I'd definitely participate in a non-.ml alternative.

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.

hell i went one step further and abandoned lemmy entirely for mbin

Yep. To a certain extent I don’t care what your political views are, but if you’re always trolling and putting them up in my face. And have no integrity rules wise, I’m blocking.

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

Blocked instance... They can figure their stuff out without me because I don't want anything to do with them.

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.

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 have fomo so I don't block anything. I'll downvote and move on if I see something that I feel needs a downvote

yup, blocked that instance.

it's controlled by one or a very small group of people, and none of the rules are followed.

The path to inner peace.

Blocked the instance along with hexbear. So I think it would be good to drain the good communities from them if you can.

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.

Personally, I don't. I get from your story that you seem to have been abusively banned, and from the comments that it doesn't seem like an isolate case. But while that might deter me from making an account there, or at most from having a community hosted there, it's not like anything bad comes to me from merely interacting with .ml content. The only servers worth blocking in my opinion are those full of spammers, or of content I'd personally hate to see in any situation.

That instance got blocked from me a while ago together with Hexbear and Lemmygrad.