"See, the problem is, that this is the fediverse," the Cat said. "You are now among weird people."
"But I don’t want to be among weird people here," OP remarked.
"Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat: "we’re all weird here. I’m weird. You’re weird."
"How do you know I’m weird?" said OP.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here."

• Alice in Wonderland, probably.

I’ve come across some pretty levelheaded people from that instance too

This was me (for some definition of level :D)

I joined .ml before I really understood the differences. Even once I realised the connotation, I didn't switch until I realised that !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works was blocked on that instance. That made me think about what instance I wanted to join (based on what communities I was most active in) and then I switched over here.

So, there are definitely a mix of people on each instance. It makes me sad when I see people jump to conclusions based on instance, although I also understand it if 90% of their experience is of a particular type of person.

Instances tend to be flavored towards certain groups of people. There are a particular group of 3 instances, one being Lemmy.ml the others known as hexbear and lemmygrad that cater to people who essentially think that all western society is corrupt and that NK, China, Russia, etc are the saviors of the world.

lemmy.ml happens to be the flagship instance of the software creators which causes a lot of friction in terms of if they should be cut off or not.

I think my crossposting explainer should suit, in general, admins of .ml are Tankies (authoritarian communists) who support and defend authoritarian countries in all the things they do like Russia, NK and China.

They propagate Russian propaganda on Ukraine (They're just being "liberated"), deny chinas genocides and NK is actually truly a socialist country and it's authoritarianism is just western propaganda.

The megathread linked below documents and has a more robust explainer

You'll get banned for showing support for Ukraine or going against Russian narratives or if you remind them of Putlers promise to not invade or just shit talking Putler in general

Or calling out propaganda sites - https://lemmy.world/post/32776038 | https://lemmy.world/post/33416433 | https://lemmy.world/post/34051329 | https://lemmy.world/post/35919522

Or so much more, I actually haven't updated the megathread in a few months, but there's more recent stuff on !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works

Join the lemmy.ml boycott today and help foster a better Lemmy-verse! No more posts, comments (except to counter their propaganda ofc!) or upvotes on any comms on the Lemmy.ml instance! To make this easy you can do an instance block at Settings > Block Tab > Scroll to bottom > Input "lemmy.ml" and apply And consider donating to individual instances instead.

Why am I cross-posting .ml content?

I cross-post from .ml to the nearest relevant non-.ml comm to reduce the influence of .ml comms and indirectly, the instance as a whole, to help vitalize non-.ml comms and make it an easier decision for other instance admins to defederate because one key reason I identified that admins don't want to defederate is because .ml still has some very large comms and some active niche comms.

Megathread on the issue

Some highlights from the link:

Dessalines, head .ml admin, lead Lemmy dev actively spreading genocide denialism https://sh.itjust.works/post/61371958

.ml admin, Nutomics continued transphobia https://lemmy.world/post/29222558 The original transphobic Comment from Nutomic: https://lemmy.world/post/18236068

"If you don't support Russia then you just don't understand geopolitics" ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/27352415

"Don't worry guys, the Uyghur Genocide was REALLY just birth control! ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/30580167

"See! nobody died IN Tiananmen Square, just AROUND it, so it doesn't count!!" ~ Davel, .ml admin https://lemmy.world/post/30673342

"NK is actually good and anything counter to that is Western propaganda!" ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/31595035

General negative sentiment to other instances who haven't "seen the way" yet ~davel, .ml admin https://lemmy.world/post/27426510

And so so much documentation on clear heavy handed censorship and bias also on the link. So much I can't even put them all here because this comment would be really long.

I believe the behavior of its admins (the main admins are Lemmy devs) does harm to the overall growth of the Lemmy-verse and maybe even the Thrediverse (since Lemmy kinda kicked off the Thrediverse) because of its association with the devs of Lemmy and their insistence to use .ml as their personal political platform to spread harmful propaganda

On the outside, bringing up Lemmy frequently leads to comments like "Lemmy? Isn't that the place with a bunch of tankies?" Or "Tried Lemmy, but found it full of pro Russia crap so I left". The best way forward from that I see is to either widely defederate from .ml like the rest of the Triad, or pressure them to put a fair and unbiased as possible admin team.

I don't think there is any organized feud, as such. A lot of instance population is actually self-selecting. Ideological instances are common. .ml happens to be one of the bigger ideological ones. Unfortunately, they tend to support authoritarian narratives coming out of countries that like to invade their neighbors. Lots of russian disinformation comes from that instance in particular.

I keep some lemmy.ml communities on my feed because it's refreshing to see news out of china that while likely propaganda, is at least not the usual flavor of propaganda.

It's over blown tribalism imo. There's a handful of accounts that are always fighting each other. The rest are just normal people.

I know nothing about lemmy.world, but lemmy.ml and hexbear.net are filled with tankies (aka angry teenagers IMHO) and have been defederated with a lot of instances.

lemmy.ml is writing the original source code of Lemmy, but I don't remember any betrayal. Most users are not throwing mud, we mostly and politely ignore each other I guess.

(anyway, come to https://piefed.social/ instead because it's the best frontend!)

For anyone wondering just what the hell a "tankie" is, as usual this article sums it up pretty well.

Don't believe a word of this, it was all hyped up by Big Fedi to drive up clicks

There's no specific instance wide feud between the two or anything. At a high level, .world is just the biggest Lemmy server currently by MAU and .ml is just the oldest and flagship ones run by the main developers of the Lemmy software.

Now, the moderation philosophy between the two differs a fair bit, which is where the rivalries and the bad blood develops between users. On most general topics you'd see very little difference, but as soon as discussion touches the Russia-Ukraine conflict, anything negative about China, and the Israel-Palestine war, the mods on ml are aggressively one-sided in their moderation, and consider anything that goes against that perception as hate-speech against Russia/China/Palestine even if that's not what you are saying. If you want an illustrative example, look in the modlog at the 'nazi apologia' comment I was tempbanned from !memes@lemmy.ml for.

Still, as community and instance managers, that's their right. There's significant overlap between lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml where moderation is more overtly this way, and hexbear.net where users like to communicate with image macros more in ways that I think most other server members find annoying. Some on world don't like that so certain users crosspost discussions from ml communities onto world communities. Some users call the ml folks tankies for their disdain of violence committed everywhere except where committed by Russia, China and its allies. Some ml users (and many lemmygrad+hexbear users) call users on other servers libs for the converse reason, excusing or not pushing back hard enough on atrocities and oppression caused by Western governments. Some users like to generalize these characterizations to every user of an instance, it seems.

Aside from high profile defederations with ml or world and some servers for various reasons, refederations, redefederations between hexbear and other servers, there have not been any specific incidents that have caused .world and .ml to grow apart. I think it's fine to let each server have its space.

.world is the generic reddit audience .ml is tankies

World and ML are two peas in a pod. The World moderators won't punish you for fighting with Tankies but they do monetarily support ML, and likewise ML developers own the Lemmy landing site which sends people to World.

My advice is to avoid Lemmy frontend whenever possible. Its maintainers are the owners of ML and really horrible Tankies, and most if not all instances who use Lemmy frontend support them directly.

For more info about that check out the the Documentation of Extremism Megathread from the !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works comm.

There is no ‘deal’

There are some extremely active and vocal users on .ml that have a specific view point that they feel is extremely important.

You will see that viewpoint expressed not just on political posts, but in the comments of seemingly unrelated topics.

It seems that .ml was defederated from world to keep some separation of that view point and other topics.

You are still fully free to join any instance you want. You can even find community here to post that content if you wish, but there is a more active and vibrant community on .ml for that content.