It is hard to overcome the network effect.

That sucks for people banned from that community due to their comments shared on entirely unrelated matters in unrelated communities elsewhere on lemmy.ml. The modlog shows that people get banned from it every other day or so - very often happening to multiple people on the same day.

Thank you for your efforts on behalf of the Fediverse. I am not sure if they are the best way to go or not (neither am I saying that I have any better ideas:-P), but at the very least I want to applaud your enthusiasm.

A year and a half ago when Kbin.social went down, I bounced around from StarTrek.Website to Discuss.Online before finally settling on PieFed.social. In that migration I found that my chief abhorrence - and what nearly caused me to leave Lemmy entirely (and ultimately did, come to think of it, in the sense that I left "Lemmy" to come to PieFed, while remaining on the Threadiverse) was not lemmy.ml, but rather hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml. Those two were WAAAAY worse.

But I get your point: lemmy.ml in some ways is worse not because it is as "in your face" as those other two, but since it appears more "normal", at first glance, and therefore is more insidious. And it is not the only one: you know about midwest.social as well, surely.

That said, it was hexbear and lemmygrad that almost caused me to nope out and surely does similarly for others as well. So I petitioned for discuss.online to defederate from the former (it already had the latter), and I included lemmy.ml in that as well but that part was declined, and now Blaze can recommend discuss.online especially to an American audience, which is what makes up the bulk of those on Reddit, to try to make Lemmy more enticing to come over here to.

After that, I sorta just gave up on Lemmy. They control the sourcecode, they control everything, it is not merely just solely their personal instance but the entire framework: Lemmy is somehow more authoritarian than even Reddit was - at least Reddit would notify you when content was removed, and offer the ability to respond via modmail, plus keep the post up (merely removing it from the community "feed", yet still the page remains accessible to someone who has the URL) so as not to delete all of the myriad other conversations that happened, having been spawned initially from the OP but taking on new life of their own. Lemmy will never catch up to this - in contrast it seems hell-bent on moving in the exact opposite direction, removing the names of mods (so now you cannot even DM them) and instead merely saying "mod", plus when content is removed the message says "try again later". Seriously, WTF!? How can "trying again at a later time" help someone find a post that they made, that got deleted and then virtually all traces that it ever even so much as existed at some point in the past are simply... gone, like it never was in the first place?!

When spez did such things, we left Reddit over it. However, when the lemmy.ml devs do them... we suck it up, and we take it. Because there are no better options, we tell ourselves, and we don't want to make our own.

Fortunately, not everyone thinks like that: Mbin has been going strong even after Ernst had all his personal problems and abandoned Kbin, Mbin took up the charge. And Sublinks got a heavy start as well (though similarly to Ernst, the main dev had personal irl issues that got in the way of finishing it). And now PieFed is not merely a heavy start but has surpassed Lemmy, and even Reddit in a number of ways - it needs some polish, sure, but it's no longer simply a "heavy start", it's a fully functioning viable Lemmy / Reddit alternative.

I give up hope on Lemmy ever doing anything to fix its major structural issues; and I now transfer those hopes to PieFed. Which solves the even more major problem of using the Lemmy sourcecode... but does not solve the problem of disinformation being spread on the Threadiverse.

Like I did in making a petition to defederate hexbear from Discuss.Online, perhaps you would like to petition PieFed.social to defederate Lemmy.ml? Lemmy.World never will, and likely discuss.online and all the others too, because of the software considerations - although PieFed.World might? (it has not yet: I still see lemmy.ml communities listed on it) You would be a good person to list out the references and make a cogent argument for the need to do so? !piefed_meta@piefed.social might be the best place to send it.

Anyway, things are improving, slowly, over time. :-)