Not exclusively, but I do think twice before posting to a community hosted there, and actively seek out alternatives if possible. The only two I haven't found alternatives for are c/crows and c/freecad.

Well, I'm here and I don't know what you all are talking about. And this is sincere, truly don't understand what's the issue, could you point me to some of these controversial situations/discussions/measures?

I have a feeling that, if you ask for any specific instance, you'll get people complaining and blocking that instance for their own reasons. So, I'd let my users decide whether they block or not a user or a whole instance. For example, I don't like some of the communities in lemmy.world and I complain about it because it just feels the same as being in reddit, but having access to a different point of view is very valuable to me, so I don't block them.

I also have to add that I use lemmy with the voting system completely disabled. I hate the voting system because it shapes people's opinions to fit in some specific communities. This is why I think blocking instances should only be used as a last resort against things like blatant spam, boycotting, CP, hate speech and the likes.

No. I self-censor a bit there, and prefer other instances so I don't have to, though.

Of course.

They banned me for calling Russia imperialist in one of their rant post, and claiming NATO was necessary because countries keep invading their neighbors.

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 [email protected] vs [email protected].

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

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

No. People complaining about ml are exaggerating.

I think it's generally best to host communities on politically neutral instances

I have to say the responses in this thread are a bummer, but I'm not surprised. I signed up on lemmy.ml because when I read the descriptions of the various instances, ML's "A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts" sounded pretty great and I saw a lot of technical communities that interested me. I didn't expect the politics. I tried to make a new user on .world a few months back, but I seemed to get stuck in some sort of user verification limbo. Maybe I'll try midwest.social since I moved to the midwest recently.

Ah, the daily whinge-fest on Lemmy.world. In my 3 decades using the internet, I have never found online communities that are so consistently in opposition to US propaganda as the .ml's and hexbear. .World is so militantly US-liberal it puts reddit to shame. You can find such opinions all over the internet, but real left wing politics are much rarer since you basically have to self-host them, unlike the corporate friendly liberal and fascist politics.

Sometimes. The only people more insufferable than .world libs are .ml "leftists".

Depends. I've reccomened this before too, but I keep both world and ml "World News" communities because even though they're defederated, having both seems to encompass a better range of sources and topics.

Yes. I find their gaming-chair leftism and obnoxious preachiness annoying enough to just avoid. My blocklist is filled with .ml users, and none of those were because of any political positions. It's because they were annoying whinging twats.

100% I do not want anything to do with .ml

I wish that political ideology wasn't such a thing to worry about on Lemmy. It's sadly easy to find extremist content, even on the homepage, when you're not logged in.

Nope.

I generally don’t worry about communities. Either the community is well run or not.

Users, though. I’ll block trolls all day long. If I notice I’m blocking a whole bunch of users from the same instance, I’ll block the instance. So far that has only happened twice. Lemmygrad and feddit.ro.

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.

I've declined the opportunity to Mod a community on lemmy.ml, which is really not like me.

Certainly. I have the entire instance blocked as their moderation, admins, and plenty of the users I've interacted with are unpleasant. It's no Hexbear or Grad, but it's enough that my experience is better without their communities.

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

Previously no. Now yes. Apparently got banned for inciting 'peril' against my own race because tankies don't know the difference between ethnically Chinese and of Chinese nationality, and apparently you can't criticize china in the forums. Throw in a few abusive individuals from the same instance shooting off the mouth and I pretty much said fuck it, I'm out.

I block subs and users and that usually takes care of 99% of the bullshit