Skip Navigation
New Communities @lemmy.world
Blaze (he/him) @feddit.org

Do you refrain from participating to a community if it's hosted on Lemmy.ml ?

Asking as there has been a few comments mentioning this with the new !stardewvalley@lemm.ee taking over !stardewvalley@lemmy.ml

!yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com for additional context on those recent events if you are interested

Also, an older post for more context on how lemmy.ml is managed: https://lemmy.world/post/16211417

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

204 comments

  • 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).....

    • Moving communities is always an option.

      We moved !casualconversation@lemmy.world to !casualconversation@lemm.ee a while ago, it worked fine, it's even more active now that it used to be as there is no delay due to LW size

      • Yep, it's something that has occurred to me, I've got an idea of which instance and all that, but I'd probably need to speak with the admins. I don't know whether communities can migrate over posts/comments etc and part of me is reluctant to leave all that behind... BUT, I've done it once from scratch, so it's not impossible

    • For me it was a blanket ban that finally caused me to unsubscribe from every ml community. If it wasn’t for that then it might be OK to keep hosting a non-political sub but the censorship over there is so aggressive and widespread that it’s very difficult to avoid.

      I would say think about migration because if anything the problem is getting worse over time.

    • I do agree that art subs in general are among the most politics-free areas of lemmy, (speaking as a moderator of traditional art)

      • I have mostly refrained from posting political art, even though I do really like a good caricature (I grew up on Spitting Image, and other British satire progs), and also political art is, well... art

        But, people come to see the nice pictures and chill out for a bit, which is fair, and it's good to have that as a community

  • 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.

    • So what you are saying is that since you are banned from lemmy.ml, you cannot participate in communities such as Firefox@lemmy.ml, for reasons entirely unrelated to anything that you said in that community?

      Which means conversely that from your perspective, that entire community - and all others likewise hosted on lemmy.ml - are "held hostage" behind you either outright agreeing with whatever stance is taken by the instance admins, about whatever subject matters they choose to be the defining criteria for exclusion from the instance, or else at least you need to STFU about your true thoughts, about e.g. China, and capitalism, and Russia, and whatever else they feel like adding at any given moment.

      It would have been nice to have had a warning presented to you, wouldn't it? Like when you first go there, have a popup or sidebar note saying "Warning: you must agree that neither China nor Russia is actively engaging in genocide in order to participate in this community discussion about...

      <checks notes>

      the popular Firefox web browser".

      I bet reading the sidebar notice presented on lemmy.ca did not quite prepare you for that!?!?!?

      It would be nicer to segregate "political" communities and instances from apolitical ones. Except these days, facts themselves are political, and all we can do is suck it and swallow.

      • Yeah it's really lame... seems like the ban is permanent, so I went ahead and blocked lemmy.ml. No point in seeing content from communities that some self-righteous admin decided I shouldn't be allowed to interact with.

        It is what it is. I already left reddit because of their bullshit owners. There's still way better communities on reddit than on lemmy.ml, and as bullshit as the owners of reddit are, they're still not as bad as the owners of lemmy.ml. So if it were really an issue to me I'd just go back to reddit. But it's fun to discuss things in smaller communities so I'll stick with lemmy, just not lemmy.ml.

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

  • 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.

    • Fwiw, lemmy.cafe defederated from lemmy.ml, and is even running a 0.19.6 beta codebase so even if there's only a single admin they seem really on the ball.

      Tesseract also has implemented a way to ban all users from lemmy.ml.

      And PieFed allows personal bans on any custom instance you choose. Plus it has "categories" of communities so that you don't have to keep searching on All, though you can do that too if you want. It seems really polished these days! Not 100% - e.g. you can't easily search for a user in the same form as a keyword - but it looks extremely usable, so I am switching to it today.

      Meanwhile, on Lemmy we were promised that 0.19.3 would allow user blocking of instances, which turned out to be not quite true, and when your instance upgrades from that to 0.19.6 when it comes out (most other instances, like mine, are already running 0.19.5), the protections that it offers will be further rolled back - e.g. on 0.19.3 I did not receive notifications from those users, whereas now on 0.19.5 I do.

      And maybe some apps allow blocking of an instance, I dunno about that aspect.

      Lemmy.ml was one of the first instances in the Fediverse... but that doesn't mean that we should be forced to listen to the stuff spewing forth from it unless we choose that for ourselves, especially in the next few months as the trolls go into overdrive due to the ongoing USA election (and likely subsequent "constitutional crisis" event).

      Anyway, I just wanted you to know that there are options! Not many, but they do exist!:-)

  • 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 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.

      Thank you for pointing this out, that's a good point

      • I have seen complaints about them, but they seem relatively minor and resulting from an overzealous attempt to protect their users, which I find understandable. I have never had anything but pleasant conversations with Ada the instance admin of lemmy.blahaj.zone and have thoroughly enjoyed everything I've ever read from them.

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

    • What’s the difference. Asking because I really don’t know. Lemmy, kbin, mbin, … what makes one better than the other, besides lemmy being (or having been?) actively developed by tankies?

      • kbin has a few extra bells and whistles, like it can also do mastodon-style "microblogging" and custom themes per user. it's since ceased developement but mbin is a fork continuing it. other than that, the experience is the same

      • Fwiw, I just abandoned Lemmy in favor of PieFed. It allows you to block whatever custom instance you want - in my case Lemmy.ml - it has "categories" of communities so you don't have to browse on All, it has a "reputation" feature that puts icons next to users doing patterns of extremely obvious trolling (like a <1-month old account with negative karma - note that such are not "banned", merely "labelled", so that you can make your own determination of what to do or not about such), and it has a fairly polished interface. It has its quirks, like searching for a user is different than searching for posts, but it keeps improving all the time and the developers are extremely receptive to feedback.

        Unlike Lemmy, where 0.19 was supposed to allow user filtering of instances, but what was delivered in 0.19.3 fell far short of desires, then 0.19.5 rolled back what little protections had been previously offered. At this point I don't think you'll ever be able to block all users from lemmy.ml, so long as you remain where you are. Lemmy.world admins could do it, but it seems highly doubtful so long as certain communities such as !Firefox@lemmy.ml are located there.

        Lemmy.cafe and Tesseract on dubvee.org have defederated from lemmy.ml though. And maybe some apps allows user-level defederation I dunno. So those seem to be your options - which aren't a lot but at least they exist!:-)

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

  • 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.

    • Pasting from another comment in this thread:

      The only way I know how to ditch the users, besides blocking each one individually, would be to make a new account on either dubvee.org or Lemmy.cafe where all 3 of the big 3 are completely defederated. Think of those instances as troll-blockers, working hard to keep the Fediverse pleasant to converse in:-).

      • lol

        Dubvee is even worse than .ml for the censorship stuff. The admin banned a ton of people that never even knew of its existence until we all got spammed by his automod bot duplicating the instance wide ban to each and every individual community.

  • 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.

    • Tbh the bigger instances need to bite the bullet and defederate from .ml. There are alternatives to all the good comms on .ml, they just aren't as active. Defederating would move a lot of users onto the alternatives and get some control back from the terrible .ml mods and admins.

      Banning people from multiple completely unrelated comms for something that happened in one comm is bullshit and they abuse the hell out of that. I generally try not to participate in any .ml comm because of that.

      • But a lot of users on a lot of instances do not want to defederate, and thereby lose their communities that they want to receive content from, e.g. Firefox@lemmy.ml. First such communities need to be migrated, or at least new alternatives made, and then the barrier to walking away will be lower. Progress is being made though, even if only slowly:-).

  • I'm more of an anarchist and I've not had issues with hexbear or .ml, though I don't block lemmygrad I'm not subbed to most of their communities mostly because sectarianism bothers me.

    I feel like I always have to check if I'm posting on something that's on .world because even relatively mild off-color humor can get removed as "incivility" if it rubs a mod the wrong way.

  • Nah, IDGAF about it one way or another. You run into more jerks there than average, but that's about it, so as long as block lists function, it's all good

  • If you move sim racing, would you mind replying to me to let me know? I follow the current one just cause I think sim racing is neat. If it gets moved I'd love to follow the new one

    (Totally fine if that's too much work :)

  • While I have not blocked the instance (yet), I purposely try not to post anything on any community hosted there and rather look for alternatives. Sometimes it's easier to comment and or post on an ml instance due to it being larger in user size such as the !privacy@lemmy.ml vs !privacy@lemmy.world - but in these cases I will crosspost too.

  • Lemmy.ml is the only instance block I have, after seeing too many illiberal shit takes, bad faith arguments and socialist astroturf posts.

    My instance quickly defederated from HexBear and LemmyGrad which is just fine by me, it's helpful most of the bad eggs are concentrated in just a few places.

    • Do you might if I ask how you accomplished that - by using some app? Or did you just mean the standard Lemmy instance block, which blocks only communities hosted there but none of the users especially their comments everywhere across the Fediverse?

      PieFed allows custom user instance blocks, of whatever instance you choose, and I think Mbin at least used to (although I also saw a bug report saying that it doesn't work right now). And Tesseract on dubvee.org and lemmy.cafe have specifically defederated from lemmy.ml, but I was curious what other methods would work as well.

      • Correct, just the communities. I still see .ml user posts and comments in other communities, which is tolerable. Plenty of them are fine. For the that aren't, the heckler's veto sometimes keeps the dumber narratives at bay.

        I appreciate that instance labels carry some meaning of how a user is likely to act.

  • I refrain from participating in and even from looking at any community that generates anxiety and/or anger, or that encourage or don't oppose what I consider destructive or hostile behaviors. I consider time too precious to waste mine with the kind of persons who enjoy those things.

    It is not related to any specific place, though. It's mostly a question of the persons participating and of the moderators.

  • Depends on the community and what has been posted. If it's something simple like AskLemmy and people aren't being super weird or preachy about communism or whatever, I don't find harm. I personally don't think I've had any bad experiences with them outside of the time I said I didn't trust a certain news outlet, which I cannot remember the name of.

204 comments