Generally, the .ml instance is where most of the tankies reside. They are critical of the US, which is fine, but are also hyper defensive of russia and china. So reasonable takes like "everybody should vote" are met with a dozen edge lords calling you a child murderer and screaming death to America.

some politics

Lol.

.ml is basically the /r/The_Donald or /r/Conservative of Lemmy. Not because they're conservatives or support Donald Trump, but because they behave the same way. The vast majority of .ml users come off as preteen edgelords who think they know everything and constantly attempt to get others to start some revolution that they want to take place but are too cowardly to initiate themselves. If you don't fall in line and agree with their extremist views, your comments are removed and you will likely be banned from their instance.

Many of them take anti-voting stances. Many of them want an anarchist system to replace democracy. They are extremely annoying and extremely ignorant. Obviously not ALL .ml users are like this, but so many of them are that the entire instance has earned a negative reputation on Lemmy. I was on Lemmy for all of a month before I found out for myself what the deal with .ml was. And it's only gotten worse since then, especially leading up to this year's election.

You should probably do what more and more of us are doing and ignore their comments and block their instance. It makes Lemmy a lot nicer to use.

FYI: This year I've noticed the dbzer0 instance trending in the same direction as .ml, so I'd keep an eye on their users as well.

"ml" is the subdomain for the country of mali, but here it's short for "marxism-leninism".

the developers of the lemmy protocol (not the fediverse as a whole, just lemmy) also run lemmy.ml as the "flagship instance".

they are out and proud tankies, meaning their politics are reactionary america-bad first, and running full throated defense of russia, china, and north korea right behind that. despite the fact that none of these wannabe empires are politically even close to any marxist roots. any criticism or independent journalism is verboten.

many of the people on these instances are propagandized westerners, but there was also an observed drop in traffic following ukraine strikes on russian datacenters.

hexbear and lemmygrad are smaller, more commonly defederated instances with even higher concentrations of tankie bullshit. ml is the more moderate gateway that has established many foothold communities on the fediverse like the one OP is referencing.

Just the general vibe they give off. Very disingenuous imo. Which is unfortunate cuz i always thought Marxist-Leninsts were suppose to be for

woah ok i did some quick reading and Marxists and Leninists are not the same as Marxist-Leninists, they are three different groups, ive got so much to learn lol

ok sorry back to the comment.

If you post a source they will always try to discredit it somehow, claiming only their sources are "accurate" or "the truth". Very derogatory/insulting/troll-ish.

Someone else described them as "r/the_Donald" of lemmy but are Marxist-Leninsts (hence ."ml") instead of MAGA.

Well I liked the idea of a community more focused on the global south. However, I often was confronted with hate and (imho) unjustified bans and deleted comments when saying that imperialism is bad, doesn’t matter who is doing it. Many people there seem to think that invading foreign countries and killing people is fine as long as it’s not done by the USA, Israel or European countries. They are the only evil ones but others (especially Russia and China) can bomb whoever they want. As I’m not silently disagreeing with that, I had some trouble with people there. But make your own experiences and choices. For sure there are also nice and reasonable people there. I would like to see more content from/about the real global south!

You will notice a pattern in the replies, and whenever the subject comes up, of thought-terminators designed to minimise your exposure to what the ml's actually do say and believe.

If you care whether what you believe is true, I suggest taking a closer look for yourself.

Just find out for yourself. Been here for years and always have been treated fine, but because my account is here, I've been treated like crap on several instances. It's all bs if you ask me.

I can't speak for others, but I've had several posts censored. I even got demodded on a sub I created (/c/intelligence). In all instances, I never received a warning, notification, message or anything. My posts were just gone, my mod privs just removed without ANY contact from who did it or why.

My understanding is that folks have issues with the instance rules. I struggle to understand why this is a problem, as it's fairly easy to block an instance you don't want to interact with.

My hot take is that the way Lemmy operates isn't fully understood. There is no central admin team. Each instance sets their own rules and enforces them and each community has their own additional rules as well. It can be confusing at times because at a glance you might not realize you are interacting with a different instance and you may not be aware of their rules. Further to that, each instance admin can remove content/ban users for actions on other instances. When you make a report on a comment or post it goes to the community mods, and I believe at least the host instance admin and the user instance admin if not more admins.

It does sound like folks might be thinking they were secretly/silently blocked because they are not aware that the mod log is public. It sounds like folks are not notified when a moderator action is taken. I think a better understanding of what one is agreeing to when interacting with each instance would resolve a lot of problems.

In this post it sounds like a post was removed and then reposted a few hours later, resulting in a temporary ban. I'd ban the person too if I was a mod! But the Op didn't seem to realize their post was removed and a reason given. If they did, they might not have reposted it. posted this meme in response, resulting in the ban.

Edit to correct factual errors..