Ask Lemmy

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.

Only thing I know is someone has a bug up their craw about .ml and made a bunch of accounts to repost .ml stuff to .world. It was kinda a good thing because I think this user is part of the reason my attitude toward blocking being an overall good thing evolved. I mean I realized it before from mmo chats but I think it kinda solidifed it for me. Other than that there is grousing from folks but overall I just block communities im not interested in and users that interact in ways im not cool with.

I know nothing about any of this. I’m on PieFed/feddit.online. I don’t even know if there’s bad stuff here or they’re blocking content/instances. I like the fediverse but sometime I feel lost and confused when I see posts like this. What am I missing here?

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

Lemmy is strongly left-leaning and well you probably know the joke where two leftist enter a bar and 3 splinter groups come out.

My general advice is to instance block lemmy.ml and avoid the war in Palestine/Israel.

Lemmy.ml is the flagship instance of the authoritarian lemmy developers @nutomic@lemmy.ml and @dessalines@lemmy.ml and they unfortunately are not separating development and server administration. As Lemmy.ml is the oldest instance, many newbies think it is "the main Lemmy instance", way before they realize what the concept of federation means. ml's influence has weakened in the last years, but it's still influencing the discussion a lot. Check !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works to get an idea about ml.

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

.ml is the old instance from before Reddit exodus and it's full of tankies and the weirdest takes you've ever seen (cue replies).

.world is the new popular instance.

That's about it. Some people read into it that ml users are upset that they are no longer the default instance and can't control the narrative. While world just doesn't care and keeps on trucking. Who knows.